fbpx
Search Results For:

Search Results for: store – Page 7

Our goal should be to ensure that all the priests ordained from our seminaries will possess the flexibility and affective maturity to live and thrive as holy shepherds and spiritual guides.
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.
Control of public deliberation and political action in America is quickly passing into the hands of an unelected oligarchy. To truly break the tyranny of Big Tech, Josh Hawley and his allies may need to drop the Jeffersonian fig leaf and forthrightly embrace a contemporary revival of Hamiltonian republicanism.
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, once a slaveholder, was the sole defender of black civil rights on the Court during the Jim Crow era. Peter Canellos’s book, The Great Dissenter, explains how Harlan’s relationship with his African-American half-brother shaped his views on racial equality.
Pitting as it does two different conceptions of popular sovereignty against each other, the debate over the Electoral College is a proxy for a more fundamental debate over what kind of regime should govern America. The history of French republicanism teaches that the closer Americans come to changing the way they elect their president, the closer they come to regime change.
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.
Written in an engaging and compact style, Benjamin and Jenna Storey’s new book is essential reading for all observers of the persistent, often hidden, but increasingly visible unhappiness of contemporary life.
Truth is not something “out there,” but a relationship between person and thing. Good literature arises out of that relationship, telling truths in a personal way, making the world it reflects more personal.
How does each and every one of us live a life that matters, that makes a difference, that has meaning, purpose, and value—and that ultimately will be a happy life in the rich sense of the term, that will be blessed? This essay is adapted from a commencement address delivered at The Mount School, a high school operated by the Bruderhof Community in New York, on June 4, 2021.
When things are falling apart, anything that stays together starts to look strange. Vows, habits of self-discipline, manners of dress and address—all the essential elements of cultural formation—can come to seem like the arcane demands of a cult. To rebuild our common life, we will have to learn to distinguish between mindless cults and mindful cultures.
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.
Joseph’s service to Pharaoh provides important lessons to Jews and Christians considering roles in government in an increasingly pagan America. Today, we neither reign from the throne in Jerusalem nor cower in the catacombs of Rome. Is there a place for us in the palace of Egypt?
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.
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.
Are Pope Francis’s insights into our world’s social and economic situation perfect? No. Should we wish that his economic advisers would represent a broader range of views and include more pro-market voices? Yes. Nonetheless, Fratelli Tutti is anything but an unmitigated attack on markets and individualism, as some have been eager to depict it. It holds valuable advice for those who favor capitalism.
Social media companies don’t fit into the framework of Section 230. Pushing the false dichotomy of “platform” versus “content creator” gives these companies more power. They can hide behind their status as platforms, claiming their filtering is perfectly neutral, undermining free speech all the while.
Parliament’s tax on paper to control the colonists’ speech through a public-private partnership has striking parallels to the public-private partnership of government and big tech today. Protecting the stack—the digital age printing presses—is not a matter of liberal or conservative politics, but of core American freedoms.
Since our founding, the idea of agricultural autonomy has encouraged reductive thinking that breaks down the farm’s purpose to fit solely profit-focused ends—and has served as a threat to healthy, whole farm communities. Farmers need more than private free enterprise; they need a collaborative supportive system.
More than 50 percent of Americans spend more than 50 percent of their waking hours living in virtual, artificial worlds rather than the given, created one in which their bodies exist. The 50 percent threshold represents a tipping point that renders dialogue, deliberation, civic friendship, and compromise extraordinarily difficult in any society.
The following began as an email exchange, initiated by Richard Stith’s message to the authors of recent Public Discourse articles—particularly this statement by Catholic scholars—arguing for the moral permissibility of receiving the COVID vaccines. Melissa Moschella responded to the message, and an insightful dialogue ensued, which we believe would be of interest to many readers. Here is a revised version of the exchange.
To live a good life, our intellect, will, and passions must be aligned with one another and with the nature of God. We must know what good we pursue, how we pursue that good, and what—or Whom—we love.
Without a revelation from God to confirm that man’s end transcends this world, politics will dominate our life and make hell on earth. But in its proper place, politics can do great good. As Fr. James Schall reminds us, the “abiding problem” of the “political enterprise” is to grasp this “limit of politics.”
It may seem strange to pair Lawrence Ferlinghetti with Ryan Anderson, who argues against virtually everything for which Ferlinghetti stood. What they have in common is the courage of their convictions, a willingness to challenge the conventional pieties of their respective ages, and to do so in ways that conformist critics are quick to label offensive, obscene, unsafe, or misframed.
Wokeness meets a religious need by mimicking a Protestantism that our society has largely left behind. Although it highlights important truths, Wokeness needs to retrieve the orthodox teaching on the universality of original sin, the Christian understanding of salvation through the divine Scapegoat, and the centrality of the Church in its social imagination.