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Statue of Dante

Dante’s Hell and Our Humanity

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My students and I—orthodox Jews at Yeshiva University—found something more profound than mere gore in Dante’s textual bequest to posterity. His hell provided us something that we could never find in his Purgatory or Paradise. For us, the Inferno’s true contribution was not its penal landscape of scorched sands and steaming pitch. On the contrary, what stirred us most was his evident concern for our humanity.

Lost in the Chaos: The Danger of Total Politics

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Every human lives out the drama of existence in his or her way, and with great risk: they gain or lose heaven, embrace or reject love, bring a child into being or not, form friendships and romances or sink into loneliness, become sages or fools. If we forget or forgo the primacy of the person, choosing instead the story of power and chaos, it seems likely we’ll lose the cosmos of our own souls.

Not a National Family: Critical Race Theory, Civic Education, and the Ties That Bind

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If a shared identity is to emerge and persist, if citizen strangers are to have a shot at becoming civic friends who recognize a mutual obligation to create a just land, the foundational principles of our constitutional order must be consciously taught and reaffirmed. And, of course, teaching and affirming these principles does not itself entail a claim that America has historically lived up to them.
Tower of Babel

There Is No City of Man Without the City of God

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Given modernity’s inability to realize Augustine’s thesis of the necessity of a common love, we have two options: we must either reject a universal socio-political vision as entirely unworkable, or the world—or at least the West—must learn again that a transcendent foundation and telos are essential to political order.
Pile of books

The Bookshelf: Books That Stick

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Some of the best perspective-altering reading experiences I’ve had in recent years have come from books that I read well outside the bounds of my own research. Nonetheless they made their way into my thinking and writing in various ways—they “stuck.” And books that “stick” in this way we are apt to recommend whenever an opportunity arises.
Piggy bank and books

The Decadence of Economics

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Economics today is a decadent discipline, with a rich legacy but atrophied creativity. Uncredentialed economists and maverick academics offer the best hope for reviving worthwhile economics.
Nick Offerman as Ignatius J. Reilly-T. CHARLES ERICKSON

How NOT to Read: Learning from A Confederacy of Dunces

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The trick of John Kennedy Toole’s novel is that it draws you into the story with its comedy without requiring you to consciously assess the disjointedness of the protagonist’s way of reading the world. Even without stepping back and intellectualizing the problem, you learn how not to read by experiencing Reilly’s inept ways of reading and living.
Women's March

Feminism’s Last Battle

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We are witnessing a kind of last battle, a feminist Armageddon that will determine whether feminism, as a movement centered upon the wellbeing of women and girls, will endure into the future or self-immolate. Only a return to realism can provide a stable definition of woman, the requisite ground for effective feminism.
Reading in a hammock

The Bookshelf: Summer Experiments and Attempts

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Summer—a time of lounging in a shaded hammock between two trees, or under a beach umbrella—is a great time for bite-sized nonfiction. With Public Discourse taking a publishing hiatus for the week following Independence Day, now is a perfect time to stretch out with some small provocation of thought.
Pile of books

Irony That Gives a Damn

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The question is not whether we will wrestle with the morality of art, but how artful our wrestling will be. Irony is not an essence or an end: irony is a means toward other aims. By nature, it appeals to our moral sensibilities, even if at its most mature it does so indirectly.
Montrose Graduation 2021

To Find Your Life’s Mission, Follow Your Questions

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What are the small and humble questions that should animate all human lives, that work to reveal to us little by little our unique mission? Questions like these: “Who or what am I responsible for today? How can I use my time well? What ought I do in this situation? How do I treat this person with the love and dignity she deserves?” We find our life’s mission not by seeking after some “castle in the air,” but by fulfilling the very concrete duty of each moment, one moment at a time.
Classroom

Coming out of Our Burrows: Anti-Fundamentalism, Free Speech, and the Academy

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A new book pushing back against fundamentalism and advocating open conversation should make readers rethink their positions. What is the proper relationship between abstract reason and personal knowledge in the academic arena? Perhaps it is a sign of admirable intellectual resilience rather than feebleness to have traits of both the hedgehog and the fox.

Called to Courage

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If we have a calling in life, it is because someone has called us. God calls each of us by name to a specific path of holiness and service to others. Important as professional success may be, the only success of ultimate importance is holiness. The only real tragedy in life is not to have been a saint.
Prague city square

Between Man and Man: Friendship, Law, and the Common Good

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Openness to love is the only satisfying defense against the supposed conflict between private happiness and the common good, the only thing that can convert the common good from an abstraction to a lived reality. The most important element of the common good, therefore, is that all of the members of the community regard themselves, somehow, as friends.
Cloister

Sohrab Ahmari’s Case for Tradition

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Sohrab Ahmari’s new book enlightens in many respects, while falling short before the tribunal of moral and political prudence. Still, it succeeds admirably in making the case for “the wisdom of tradition” as the one thing most needful today.
William and Mary

Freshman Orientation: An Introduction to Monolithic Higher Education

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My snapshot of freshman orientation highlights some of the failures of higher education. Too many universities today no longer teach students how to think but what to think. Instead of a marketplace of ideas, campus has become an echo chamber of ideas. But outspoken students (and faculty) can save the university by thoughtfully and deliberately making their voices heard.

Conversion Therapy Bans: Enforcing a Faulty Anthropology on Sex and Gender

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A growing number of jurisdictions have taken steps to pass bans on “conversion therapy,” a term referring to efforts or interventions to change or suppress the sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI) of persons. These bans enforce a message of expressive individualism—that the only acceptable response is to “affirm” a person’s SOGI—and rest on a faulty anthropology on sex and gender. They infringe upon aspects of individual and group autonomy, and they negatively impact public order, health, and moral considerations.
Corporate office

Managerial Oligarchy: Why Conservatives Should Oppose Big Business

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Free market dogmas are inapplicable to the managerial oligarchy. A politically coordinated cabal of opaquely owned companies is not private property in the way a local coffeeshop is. To do nothing while a managerial mob uses the wealth we have entrusted to them to seize power over us is a betrayal of ourselves, our nation, and our posterity.
Oath of the Horatii

Reflections from a Dean of Students: Virtue versus the Agreeable

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Civilize your children long before you allow them to inhabit the decivilizing island of social media. Make sure that they can govern their own souls. But remember that virtue isn’t only about restraining impulses. It is also, and especially, about loving the good. Don’t just take things away. Give your children something better.
Constantine the Great Statue

America, Liberalism, and Catholicism

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Resist the temptation to outsource your thinking to a team or a party. Rooting for a team is appropriate in sports, and partisan politics may be a necessity of a political system like ours, but both are detrimental to the intellectual process. Catholics should not think of discussions about the Church’s relationship to American liberalism as a Battle Royal between competing camps—but as a conversation among friends seeking the truth in community. Adapted from the introductory remarks delivered on April 15, 2021 at the University of Dallas’s conference on America, Liberalism, and Catholicism.
Statue of Liberty and NYC

How to Kill a City: Learning From De Blasio’s Dystopia

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Progressive strongholds face unprecedented fiscal challenges. The example of New York City illustrates what not to do—and suggests a way forward.
American factory workers

The Limits of the Free Market: Four Responses to Samuel Gregg

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What role does economic policy have to play in advancing a conservative agenda? Should the American right move away from a commitment to an unfettered free market and embrace nationalism, protectionism, and more government support for families?

The Unsoundness and Imprudence of “Common-Good Originalism”

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After decades of struggle, the conservative judicial project has finally produced a possible working majority of five originalists on the Supreme Court. There are plenty of reasons to wonder how consistently they will coalesce in practice and how willing they will be to revisit wrong precedent. But trashing Antonin Scalia’s originalism and replacing it with Josh Hammer’s idiosyncratic, results-oriented version isn’t likely to help matters.
Stack of books with laptop on wooden table

The Bookshelf: In Praise of University Presses—and of One in Particular

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What libraries do on the demand side—acquiring the books and other materials that their faculty and students need to do their research—the university presses do on the supply side, bringing important research into print. Unfortunately, one of the best university presses in the country now faces the threat of closure.
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