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Man at crossroads

How to Make Life-Changing Decisions

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For the most significant choices of our lives, we only learn what the decision entails after we make it. This creates something of a dilemma. We only get the information needed to make a well-informed decision after we have committed to a particular choice. We are confronted with choices whose outcomes, potential goods, and impact on our lives we cannot fully anticipate.

Joyous Surrender: A Rhapsody in Red (and Green)

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Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world.
woman absorbed by her cell phone

Modern Man Is Psychologized, Sexualized, Politicized—and Digitized

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While the digitized promises of meta-man may entice us, they are ultimately false promises based on a rejection of fundamental aspects of human embodiment. There is an integrated wholeness to man that requires both resting in the givenness of human identity and actively engaging with the world.
Petri Dish with drops of material and micromanipulators over it in the laboratory of the in vitro fertilization. Macro photo with selective focus. Horizontal.

Lives in Limbo: A Case for Embryo Adoption

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Scripture and tradition tell us something astonishing about our embryonic brothers and sisters currently being kept in frozen storage: they are a vulnerable population that perhaps demands our attention the most. Indeed, embryo adoption appears to be smack-dab in the center of the demands of the Gospel.
Assembly line

The Burden of Being a Family

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As some of the financial benefits to marriage have eroded, it can be tempting to use policy to make family formation more attractive. The rising median age at first marriage and first birth, however, largely arise from a mix of technological progress and preference for career, which aren’t things policies can reverse. Better solutions come from civil society, where entrepreneurs work to find solutions to the everyday problems modern parents face and religious communities help young adults order their priorities.

Intergenerational Wealth: A Vision of Property and Stewardship

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An ethic of stewardship induces a person to acquire and care for property, and the ownership of property helps to stimulate an ethic of stewardship. When both are present and healthy, the formation of intergenerational wealth—in the form of intergenerational property—will naturally emerge.
The marble columns of the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington DC

Dobbs and the Renewal of Federalism

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We should celebrate Dobbs—but cautiously, for it is only the beginning of the project of constitutional restoration that needs to be done. If Dobbs is to stand, American society must move away from the stifling, tyrannical concentration of national power that we are experiencing now and begin a return to the balanced government of the Founders’ Constitution.
Photo of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s Vision of Freedom

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In the face of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s independence of spirit—her reluctance to attach herself to a partisan or intellectual movement—exemplified precisely the sort of political action that she believed to be the foundation of freedom. In our own age of polarization, she stands as a powerful reminder of the necessity—and even the nobility—of political engagement.
cambridge university

Truth-Seekers or Coddlers at the Elite University? A Conversation with James Orr

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An ideologically captured university creates the illusion of consensus on questions that in fact are highly contested off campus. That makes public disagreement a puzzling and unintelligible phenomenon. It creates a cascade of resentment and negative sentiment throughout the rest of the elite classes towards any dissenting views in the public square. It shatters a society’s understanding of itself and its role in the world, of what social flourishing looks like.
Painting of James Madison

Before Critiquing the American Founding, We Should First Understand It

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According to Steven Smith, it’s meaningless to speak of our inherent natural rights. He dismisses the Founders without properly understanding them. A return to the Founders’ natural rights constitutionalism may not offer the best alternative to protect religious liberty today. But we cannot even entertain the possibility that it might if we do not understand the principles of justice or the practical meaning of the philosophy that originally animated the Constitution.
Photo of Independence Hall in Philadelphia

Bare-Bones Religious Freedom

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In Religious Liberty and the American Founding, Phillip Muñoz believes that there is a kind of natural rights logic that leads to his minimalist version of religious freedom. His central premise is that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the “natural rights” logic that was prevalent in the Founding period; and he tries to follow this logic to its conclusions, come hell or high water.
Photo of marble arches with twin stairways and stained glass

University Life Depends on the Moral Life  

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Reason cannot become right reason unless the will is in love with the Truth; intellectual formation requires moral formation. And yet, as my previous essay argued, the university—the teacher of the intellect—cannot impart moral principle of itself. Moral communities, therefore, naturally complement the university’s work. But still more beneficial to the university is the moral witness of each person.
Image of a digital room

The Metaverse Is Not Morally Neutral Technology

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French philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s writings on “intersubjectivity” help us see why the metaverse impedes our ability to grasp reality’s most important truths. When every aspect of how I present myself to others is a choice, all my relations become objects of manipulation. Without the authentic connections of involved, concrete, and personal relationships, I become irretrievably disconnected from reality.
Cartoon of ragged school

A School Model That Could Transform Society

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Lord Shaftesbury’s success in transforming education for the poor provides a variety of lessons for us today. His “ragged schools” suggest that by increasing local control of schools, expanding vocational training, and introducing curricula that recognize the integrated nature of human beings, our society might become more enriched—both materially and spiritually.
Person holding iphone on Twitter

Truth and Debate During COVID

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One lesson my students and I learned during the pandemic is that, in politics, our debates don’t rely upon pure reason. Government, media, and popular opinions—all in different ways and for different reasons—are shaped by their factional commitments. And, as we saw during COVID, the internet magnifies the viral nature of ideas, both for good and for ill.
Photo of California Flag next to American flag

California “Transgender Refuge” Bill Usurps Parental Rights and Endangers Children

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If Governor Newsom signs California’s transgender youth “refuge” bill into law, it will be one of the most explicit and radical assaults on parental rights that our nation has ever seen. While debates about how best to care for children with gender dysphoria are ongoing, one thing is clear: encouraging troubled children to run away from home and dividing them from their parents is certain to inflict great harm.
queen, flowers, flag

How to Make a Monarch

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In an egalitarian age, the British monarchy not only persists but flourishes because of three related and often overlooked factors: British people don’t really know the monarch, so they construct one in their preferred image, and this results in a sense of ownership that provides an unexpected democratic dimension, while also offering the possibility of reform and renewal.
Thomas Wyck painting, "Scholar in his study"

Why You Should Enjoy Being Perplexed

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Being perplexed means allowing other people and ideas to change or move you at times. Perplexity doesn’t seek cheap or easy answers to serious questions. And it isn’t satisfied with momentary highs from oversimplified and triumphant assertions, but prefers the rewards of prolonged contemplation. Perplexity also turns its sights from the grotesque, and doesn’t abuse its objects for the sake of stimulation or entertainment.

In Defense of Liberalism

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Francis Fukuyama offers a useful account of the pathologies of liberalism and argues that it still has the internal resources necessary to resist its critics. But his defense of liberalism seems designed only to appeal to likeminded centrists. Liberalism today should not be about splitting differences and seeking moderation, but staking out its ground and affirming its beliefs.
Edvard Munch painting, "evening on Carl Johan Street"

Don’t Panic

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For the rationalist or fundamentalist character, hope cannot but seem inadequate, even corny. Such a character has a rage for order and cannot but suffer an anxious repulsion for disorder. Hope, on the other hand, is not blind, or merely optimistic, nor is hope something we churn up in ourselves as a kind of subjective attitude. Hope, rather, is a virtue. It is a state that perfects us, makes us well, capable of thinking, living, and acting in the freedom of excellence.

Collegiate Advice: Treasure the Ordinary

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As young people prepare for college and early adulthood, they should reject conventional narratives that celebrate self-fulfillment and careerism. Instead, they should foster commitment to people, places, and ideas, and prepare for hardship and sacrifice. These countercultural habits and practices are difficult to establish, but they will serve one well in all stages of life.

How to Find Joy in College and Life

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During your time in college and for the rest of your life, you will encounter many people who have been wounded by lies and sin and are desperate for the truth, even if they don’t know it. Study well so that you can tend to them like the Good Samaritan did to the man by the side of the road.
students, library, books

What Do We Mean by Liberal Education?

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“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “Little Gidding,” “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Such is the task of a liberal education, rightly understood. It is a liberating exploration that results not in being permanently uprooted and alienated but in being more fully at home in the world that we already inhabit—and more fully able to enhance it, beautify it, ennoble it, and sustain it.
Painting of Edmund Burke

The Dilemmas of the American Burkean

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The arguments of Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery reveal both the value and the difficulty of applying a Burkean approach to human social life in a modern, non-Burkean society like our own. Part two of a two-part review.
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