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The overturn of Roe could be a key pivot point back to the ordered, republican decision-making the Constitution demands, encouraging a return to legislative politics that demands calm reflection, moral seriousness, negotiation and compromise, and living with principled disagreement.
The future of conservatism lies in building a program on political, policy, cultural, social, and educational foundations that can rebuild America from the ground up. Anything short of that will merely prolong our agony.
Built Better Than They Knew Studies endeavors to show that our practice of self-government rises above simplistic ideological reductions and achieves political equilibrium. From its beginnings, our country has been a blend of ideas, practices, and understandings of what it means to be a free and flourishing human person within community, local and national. That means that our theory must be sufficiently aware of a political practice that involves contrasting accounts of how Americans choose to be constitutional.
Solzhenitsyn’s 1968 book Cancer Ward presented a metaphor of the state as a physician to capture what was happening in the Soviet Union. But the book can also help us examine American society in the Age of COVID.
In his recent book, Roosevelt Montás offers an account of the university that is critical without being despairing, provides a way of talking about identity that is sensitive without being reductive, and articulates a hopeful vision for academic renewal through a recommitment to liberal education.
Civility has a distinctly minimal character you don’t see with virtues like decorum or politeness—the idea that one can be merely civil. This means that to be civil is to meet a low bar grudgingly, and it is important for any adequate definition of civility to account for that minimal sense.
The only way to find out about happiness is not with instruments or surveys, but with thoughtful conversation that cross-examines common views about happiness held throughout history.
The way out of rushing to surgical interventions lies in acknowledging that transgender identification has deep roots in the psyche and evaluating gender distress through the lens of adverse childhood experiences.
The recent anniversary of Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech provides an opportunity to reflect on the enduring relevance of his insights into the role of virtue and action in education, the importance of family life that is ordered towards the creation and formation of the next generation, and the need to build political community based on truth and integrity.
How we treat imperiled newborns—not only after a failed abortion attempt, but also in a more traditional NICU setting—is essential for fully grasping the current understanding of the right to abortion. When we examine the central role ableism plays in both sets of issues, thinking about them together provides an anti-ableist critique that has important implications for both prenatal and neonatal justice.
New Jersey’s sample lessons for K–12 state-required sexual orientation and gender identity instruction sparked parental outrage. The sample curriculum contradicts basic biology, offers age-inappropriate lessons about sexual abuse, and imposes an LGBTQ religion on public school children. Nonetheless, New Jersey parents still have the power to influence what happens in the classroom.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, some judicial conservatives have eschewed the virtue of constraint in favor of an ahistorical and excessively libertarian notion of the free exercise of religion. To achieve the correct balance between liberty and order, and to prevent activist judges granting religious exemptions in areas outside of their expertise, conservatives should return to a more realistic view of the limited role of the courts in the regulation of religious practices.
Are Big Tech and social media entirely to blame for the triumphs of the erotic, the therapeutic, and the transgender? Of course not. But there is no question the dominant social media companies have seriously contributed to these trends.
The debate over whether it is grace or nature that directs human beings towards the beatific vision was one of the most contentious intra-Catholic theological disputes of the twentieth century. David Bentley Hart’s 2022 You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature shows that the debate is alive and by no means merely academic and inconsequential—pantheism, tradition, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy are all very much at stake in the argument.
Based on Russia’s advantages in soldiers, tanks, and aircraft, Putin’s forces should have taken Kyiv, decapitated the Ukrainian government, and installed a pro-Russian regime in just a few days. But numbers aren’t everything. If they had paid closer attention to Russia’s greatest novel, War and Peace, Putin’s strategists might have been less surprised.
Andrew Doyle offers a splendid contribution to the ongoing debate over free speech, with a constructive approach that might surprise those familiar only with his Twitter alter ego. Though brief in length and focused on free speech in the West, the book is replete with thoughtful insights and relevant stories that provide the basis for his powerful advocacy of free expression.
Several Catholic dioceses have conflated the teaching of the Church with scientific or prudential judgment about the common good during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has led many bishops to dismiss legitimate concerns about COVID vaccines felt by individuals with sensitive consciences. In so doing, these bishops ignore the Church’s teachings about the grave duty to obey one’s conscience.
At used bookstores, I’ve discovered lesser-known titles from celebrated authors—Waugh, Koestler, and Cather. These works represent this most precious impulse of twentieth-century literature: that every life that comes within our reach has its claim on us, and is not to be wasted or sacrificed to any cause, program, or system on which we have the conceit to place a higher value.
The majority of parents are very angry about everything that has happened—not just the masking, not just the closing schools, but the combination of all of that. And it’s the fact that the people on the school boards, and Democratic politicians, by and large, just refuse to admit that this was wrong, and that it had consequences. And when they refuse to do that, why on earth would anyone vote for them again?
Given that there are natural sex differences, it’s no surprise that those differences include some tendencies that can cause problems. This is true for both men and women. Yet the tenor of contemporary academic discussions about men, such as in the discourse about “toxic masculinity,” is much more negative. Properly understood, however, the problematic tendencies within the male condition actually present opportunities for virtue. Thus, they can form the foundation of a positive conception of manhood centered on the virtues of gentlemanliness, moral courage, and chastity.
Veronica Roberts Ogle’s 2020 book, Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine’s City of God, shows that Augustine’s critique of the earthly takes place within a broader sacramental vision. He aims at purging amor sui and orienting it toward amor Dei, cleansing our souls of the lust for securitas. Politics can only be improved by personal responses to grace—which no political institution can hope to generate. Improvement of political spaces must occur beyond politics.
Perhaps the end of the pandemic is not a matter of eliminating COVID-19 but rather coming to terms with our own mortality. We need to learn how to survive and thrive in the pandemic, even as we try to mitigate the effects of the virus. For guidance, we can turn to Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, who was delivered from his anxious, tormented bondage by conquering his fear of death and adopting selfless concern for others.
The continuity between administration and teaching for me has always had to do with the question of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual development of young people. Finding creative ways to meet students where they are and draw them into the most important questions is a source of endless fascination for me. When it comes to education, it may be the case that, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, the only way to carry on sustained debate is from within and between rival traditions, assuming, that is, that members of a particular tradition are genuinely interested in engaging perspectives quite different from their own.
For the conservative theorists of the poison pill, everything becomes about ideas. According to them, Ockham, Scotus, Bacon, Descartes, Locke—they are the important bad guys who determined the decadence of our time and the problems we should be talking about. But ideas don’t work this way; reality does not proceed with perfect logic like it so conveniently does in the textbooks.