fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search
Close this search box.
Search Results For:

Search Results for: century – Page 9

Uniform buildings on a college campus

An American Tragedy: On the Suicide of Liberal Education

By
Life’s biggest questions are almost never resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and if we don’t study the differences between the Epicureans and the Stoics, between Locke and Rousseau, and between legal originalists and non-originalists, we are missing out on our own music: sometimes a battle of the bands, sometimes cacophony, always fascinating.
Computer support engineer installing processor. Microprocessor with clearly visible silicon core and cache chip. Installation of computer processor in the socket.

The Semiconductor Industry and the Future of the World Economy (Part I)

By
Without a leading semiconductor industry of its own, China will not have the military capability to challenge the United States for world military leadership and, for example, be able to “reconquer” Taiwan. Similarly, without the best in-house processors, it is difficult to exploit all the advantages promised by artificial intelligence, including its military applications such as programming advanced drones.
Florenz, Galileo Galilei

Eppur si muove: The Legend of Galileo

By
From beginning to end, the Inquisition’s actions were disciplinary, not dogmatic, although they were based on the erroneous notion that it was heretical to claim that the Earth moves. But opinions of theologians are not the same as Christian doctrine. The error the Church made in dealing with Galileo was an error in judgment. The Inquisition was wrong to discipline Galileo, but discipline is not dogma.
happy parents sitting on sofa and looking at little kids playing with domino tiles at home, 1950s style

Conservatives Can Do Better Than ’50s Nostalgia

By
The 1950s have two main nostalgic pulls on conservatives: aesthetic and technocratic. Both rely on a constructed past that has little to do with the realities of American history—and therefore neither type of ’50s nostalgia offers serious solutions to the country’s problems. In fact, early conservatives like William F. Buckley, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk saw the postwar liberal settlement of the ’50s as a betrayal, not an embodiment, of the best of the American political tradition.
Digital painting of crowds cheering or demonstrating with waving USA flags in Washington DC, digital artwork with matte painting

National Conservatives for the Status Quo?

By
By deviating from the American political tradition, national conservatives double down on rather than challenge many of our political ills.
woman in warm sweater reading book at home

The Scandal of Virtuous Reading

By
In The Scandal of Holiness, Jessica Hooten Wilson suggests that we shift from passive, uncritical acceptance of cultural mores and entertainment to active formation in virtue, leading toward a life of sainthood. To do this, we need stories of sanctity that do not elide the messiness of everyday reality. These stories are neither saccharine accounts of cheap piety nor dry philosophical and moral theories.
John Witherspoon statue in Princeton

Damnatio Memoriae: Princeton’s Witherspoon Statue Controversy

By
Aside from a certain gruff nobility, the statue of John Witherspoon in Princeton is not overly stylized; he’s human, which is to say, flawed. A hero in bronze he may be, but with feet of clay, Witherspoon is worth remembering as he is portrayed there.
Benjamin Franklin

The Bookshelf: Writing in the Mirror

By
Whether it is an account of one’s whole life, or a memoir focused on a certain period or aspect of one’s life, or a published journal or diary, the author of an autobiography is too deeply interested (in both senses of that word) to achieve a really critical distance. Can the autobiographer, the memoirist, or the diarist be trusted?
Stock Market Graph next to a 1 dollar bill (showing former president Washington). Red trend line indicates the stock market recession period

The Morality of Money

By
Finance facilitates the collaboration necessary for the functioning of a free market economy, but does it do so in accordance with concepts of justice and fairness?
School boy memorizing the lesson in classroom

There Is No Thinking without Memorizing

By
We deploy faddish educational notions such as “critical thinking” to the detriment of our students. What is often derided as “rote-learning” is actually essential to sophisticated analysis. Memorization creates a base of knowledge. We draw upon this foundational knowledge as we engage in more conceptual thinking.
Photo of Leo XIII tomb

Liberalism and Leo XIII

By
Not all democracy is like that of the French Revolution; not all liberalism is unhinged from virtue and moral norms; and a free economy is anthropologically sound and therefore more conducive to human dignity and flourishing than a state-controlled one. Democracy and freedom come as a package.
The United States capitol building in Washington DC on a summer day with its flag waving in the wind..

The Congressional Fight over the House Speakership Was a Good Thing

By
The long debate over who should be speaker was a healthy expression of Madisonian transactional politics, and it had helped illuminate the path toward restoring the People’s House as the seat of American self-governance.
Multiple storeys old library

Remembering Paul Johnson, the Historian of Human Dignity

By
Underlying Paul Johnson’s historical writing was the sense that people possess an innate dignity. To Johnson, history was the story of people—flawed, creative, reasoning, exceptional—with the capacity for incredible achievement. People, he thought, were made with a purpose, and that meant history has a purpose.
Photo of Cardinal Pell in wine cellar

Seven Days with Cardinal Pell

By
I consider myself lucky to have gotten to know George Cardinal Pell a bit—and that after his 80th year.
Depressed Teenager sit on the Roof Of Building

Can Fatherhood Cure the Modern Male Malaise? A Conversation with Richard Reeves

By and
“Masculinity is more socially constructed than femininity. The script is more important. It has to be nurturing, not in the same way as mothers, but by being similarly other-centered. Creating a surplus, caring for others, sacrificing for others. The question then is, what are we going to build that script around? That sense of being needed, giving, other-centered? My answer to that is fatherhood.”
Hands crossed in prayer

Confronting Faith’s Postmodern Problem

By
In the postmodern world, orthodox religion suffers less for being thought demonstrably false than from claiming the authority of truth at all. This absence of consensus about truth is reflected in the variety of perspectives contained in a collection of essays by seventeen thoughtful Orthodox Jews. Since their reflections on the causes and conditions of belief apply to all religions, all believers are likely to find something instructive in this book.
Bnei Brak , Israel - October 18 . 2018: The interior of the synagogue Brahat ha-levana in Bnei Brak . Israel . Designated congregation and the altar.

The Legacy of Living Jews

By
Instead of focusing on what the world has done to the Jews, it is far more worthwhile to investigate the way Jews have not only survived, but thrived.
Abstract blurry portrait of a depressed man with mental personality disorders

Apocalyptic Politics: Christianity and the New World Order

By
As our dependence on technology reshapes the moral imagination of our culture to see human beings as psychological wills that need not respect material limitations, so the old order that was built upon the vision of human beings as both body and soul will become increasingly implausible. The things that make Christianity stand out from the wider culture—belief in the incarnation, the resurrection, and embodied human nature as a real, universal thing with moral consequences—are antithetical to the terms of membership in the emerging world order.
Book cover of the Betrothed

A Masterpiece Novel That Should Be an Instant Classic

By
In Alessandro Manzoni’s recently translated novel, The Betrothed, the world is regularly pitted against the sanctity of a few. The novel often asks the reader, an implicit echo, how do you live as a faithful Christian when so much evil persists in the world? But more than anything, it shows us the reality of forgiveness and the possibility of fulfilling Jesus’s most challenging commandment: love your enemies.
American Flag Celebration. Navy Soldier with United States of America Flag in Hands. Military Concept.

Treatise or Tweet? A Review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (Part 1)

By
Stephen Wolfe’s dedication to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest two centuries of sources for a popular audience is impressive. However, if scholarly recovery alone were the aim of the book, it is doubtful that Wolfe would have written it, Canon would have published it, or American Protestants would buy it. Why not? Wolfe wants his admittedly idiosyncratic vision to improve the future, not simply engage academic specialists. That turns out to be a mixed blessing.
Open book and reading glasses on the table, illuminated by sunlight. Stack of vintage books in the background. Selective focus.

Classic, Contemporary, and Controversy: The 2022 Public Discourse Book List

By and
Reading recommendations from Public Discourse and the Witherspoon Institute.
Sunrise over the St. Peters Basilica in Vatican City. Morning at the most famous landmark, empty of people street, cloudy sky.

The Unfolding and Unsettling of Vatican II

By
George Weigel’s book on the meaning and legacy of Vatican II is persuasive as a history of ideas, but in focusing on context and content it seems to miss the sense in which the Council is an unfolding event that calls Catholics to encounter Christ and walk away changed and challenged.
white masks patterned with on a black background

Cyborg Feminism

By and
The final frontier for equality between the sexes—the missing tech fix—was always, how do we deal with reproduction? How do we deal with the different reproductive roles between the sexes? How can we use tech to flatten those differences? So reproductive inequality is the final frontier in replacing the sexes with the atomized, sexless, liberal person.
People voting election poll

Religion Is Good for Democracy, but Is Democracy Enough?

By
For Robert Wuthnow, the purpose of democracy is not to arrive at some perfectly blessed country but instead learn how to contest—not resolve—our differences through organizing, argument, elections, and voting. Fair enough. But that seems too thin a conception of democracy, one that really puts too much faith in the democratic process as such.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved