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Pillar

Education & Culture

The fourth pillar, education and culture, is built upon the recognition of two essential realities. First, the Western intellectual tradition requires a dedication to and desire for truth. Second, education takes place not only within colleges and universities but within our broader culture, whose institutions and practices form us as whole persons.

True Strength Requires Commitment

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True Strength Requires Commitment

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Many people in the current sexual landscape have perverted the authentic goal of the sexual act by making its only goals pleasure and satisfaction. But the wisdom of Pope John Paul II teaches us that there is a precise meaning tied to the sexual drive.

A Physician’s Pandemic Perspective, Five Years Later: An Interview with Donald Landry

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Medicine goes back 5,000 years. Medicine is already 2,500 years old when Hippocrates articulates the Oath, and it hasn't even started the infancy of its science. So for millennia, the medical profession has been in service of those in need—regardless of risk.

Optimizing for Holiness: App Culture and Catholic Spirituality

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Exodus 90’s use of the “why” is particularly fruitful, turning a powerful but potentially self-centered aspect of psychology into a means of loving others. Apps like these can help users to build virtue and grow closer to God. But even with a transformed “why,” there is a tension between the Christian spiritual life and the user-centered framework built into the form of a lifestyle app, because the app offers a vision of happiness as gradually increasing control over one’s life.

Society Stays Christian Longer If It Respects Religious Freedom: New Evidence from Pew

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If Christians want America to be more Christian, they should recommit themselves to the deeply Christian principle of freedom of religion.

Patience, Docility, and Hope

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It’s Lent, again, and that’s good news. We are asked to acknowledge our moral agency along with our responsibility for distorting ourselves—without shifting blame to any other—and then to repent, in patient docility, sustained by a hope that distortion can become integrity and our sorrows turn to joy.

The Freedom of Lent

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Lent is not merely an occasion to give up chocolate or beer, do a few good deeds, and give a bit more to charity, although those are all acceptable ways to do penance. Lent is more: an intransigent insistence that humans are free and possess, in whatever condition they happen to find themselves, the dignity of responsibility.

The Deceitfulness of Wealth

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If wealth is as deceitful as Christ teaches in this parable of the sower, and we are the wealthiest society that has ever existed, then the occasion for temptation and deception is greater as well. And so we must cultivate habits of gratitude for what God has provided to us and practices of giving for what God wills.

Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License

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Called to Liberty may prove useful for those outside the Church who seek a broad introduction to the paradoxes of freedom. Still, more is needed to recover freedom from its current drubbing by both radicals on the Left and reactionaries on the Right—a drubbing that increasingly rejects measure, moderation, and maturity. 

Wine, Medicine, and Risks to Health

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The new antagonism toward wine and other forms of alcohol seems similarly de-personal to me. It neglects the way that wine, at its best, functions in relationships: at a family meal, a wedding, a couple celebrating their anniversary, and the Eucharistic feast. And it treats what should be an individual decision—to drink or not—entirely in terms of a statistical approach to alcohol’s health risks.

Scrutinizing the Sacred

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Scruton was acutely aware that, in a society that has largely lost its religion, art can give people a sense of the timeless and transcendental. That is why he spent his life defending genuine art from those who would “do dirt on life.” However, it is also true that art can never provide the redemption that is promised by religion. The reason for this is that while art may offer us “intimations” of the sacred, only religion can reconcile us to it. 

Ozempocalypse?

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It’s unclear so far what, if any, decisive or long-term impact Ozempic might have on American health. But the contours of the debate are revealing.

Forming a Cultural Mind

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If you want a guide for revitalizing Western academia and culture, read Joseph Stuart’s masterly introduction to the thought of Christopher Dawson.

In Defense of Christian Civilization

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In announcing Christianity’s incompatibility with civilization, Kingsnorth implicitly claims to have noticed a vital truth of the faith that was somehow overlooked by most of the great teachers of Christianity for most of Christian history. This is a rather dubious proposition.

Harmonizing Heaven and Earth: A Response to Kingsnorth’s “Against Christian Civilization”

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The answer to the fear of Babylon, then—Kingsnorth’s “civilizational Christianity”—is not to relinquish the fields where civilization is made in order to pursue a purer form of Christian service. The answer is rather to seek the Kingdom first with such clarity of intention that every domain of human making can assume its rightful share in Christ’s offering of himself and all created things to his Father.

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

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Once you concede that the universe might be a bit more than just a collision of atoms doing meaningless expansions and contractions, you are not standing alone next to an enigmatic aurochs, staring with bafflement into its inhuman eyes. No, you are standing in the same place that generations of human beings have found themselves before: at the beginning of a journey, a quest, a pilgrim’s progress, that you have good reason to believe is going somewhere quite important, somewhere of ultimate significance.

Jordan Peterson and the Problem of God

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Peterson is not looking to illuminate the pages of the Bible per se. He seems interested in the Bible only insofar as the stories it contains connect with other mythical or symbolic stories throughout human history, and support his main thesis: that each individual should aim at that which is highest and organize life (and by extension, society) accordingly.

The Civics Playbook

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A lot of people will no doubt want to know about the political direction of the new civics centers, and there is no hiding that they are inspired by conservative intellectual sensibilities. But to think that there is any sort of partisan agenda set from above misses the point of these schools entirely.
Venus de Medici

Written in Water: A Look inside the Currents of Art History 

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What makes the popularity of a work of art wax and wane is one of the most intriguing questions in the history of aesthetic preferences.
university

The Bookshelf: The Academy in Crisis

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How can the academy recover its vocation, its true identity as a center of humane inquiry?
Orthodox church

The “Finest in Disorganized Religion?” Orthodox Christianity Endures

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While Orthodoxy’s “multipolar” context arguably can foster temporary frictions, across centuries it has also lent itself to an oddly flexible resilience, not always easily legible to Western perspectives.
Cross ontop of a keyboard

Emerging Tech and Religious Freedom

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As lawmakers across the country increase their scrutiny of emerging technologies, tech-savvy religious organizations will have to navigate an increasingly contested boundary line between the requirements of law and the demands of faith.
Cross on a hill

Tracing the Work of Redemption throughout History

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McDermott’s central claim is surely right. In everything and in every place, God is providentially at work to effect redemption. If engaging with his work can foster this awareness in us as readers, then that is precisely a “dimensional difference” that will be all to the good, raising to greater consciousness the wonder and beauty of God’s work.
Cardinal Newman

John Henry Newman, Ida Görres, and the Power of Hagiography: An Interview with Jennifer Bryson

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The book’s importance goes beyond the perennial value of Newman; Görres penetrates deeply into the heart of Newman’s character and life. In doing so, she reveals what made him holy, and holiness is of perennial value.
Notre Dame

A Restoration Worth Noting: Notre Dame Lives On

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It is once again time to build in stone, to raise walls high, to vault our ceilings in limestone, to buttress the walls, to construct heavy timber and lead towers to the heavens, and to revive the art of murals, statues, and stained glass.
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