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

The Online Staying Power of a “Ballerina Farm”

By
Read More

Learn more about Education & Culture: get your free eBook today!

Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Utah farmland

The Online Staying Power of a “Ballerina Farm”

By
Neeleman is not just any influencer; she has emerged as a sort of avatar in America’s cultural battles. The subheading of the Times profile asks whether she represents an “empowering new model for womanhood” or a “hammer blow for feminism.” The author, Megan Agnew, strongly suggests the latter.
Prison

No Porches in Prison: God, Civility, and Redemption

By
Civility is an important but secondary virtue. It cannot sustain itself. We can find hope for a healthier culture in a rather surprising place. 
young adults

Why Do Today’s Emerging Adults Need a Playbook? A Q&A with Anna Moreland

By and
With respect to love, the loneliness epidemic is real. And that affects not just romantic relationships, but friendships as well. At the end of the day, life is a gift, and the center of life is who you love. That doesn’t start happening when you’re in your mid-thirties. It starts happening now
church

A Surprising Generational Rift in the Christian Reformed Church

By
In their denominations and elsewhere in the church, some progressive Baby Boomers have been caught by surprise at younger people not sharing their cultural values. But should they have been surprised at this generational rift in the church? Looking at how different generations have been formed morally, socially, and culturally may help address this question.
Europe

Pierre Manent’s Multifaceted Defense of the European Nation-State

By
Pierre Manent has been a penetrating critic of the European Union, a measured but firm defender of the nation-state, and a Catholic thinker who has made signal contributions to the understanding of the Church’s role in European history, and to the understanding of many of its eminent thinkers. 
religious persecution

The Complexity of Compassion: A Review of Knox Thames’s Ending Persecution

By
Thames’s recent book is a thought-provoking and enlightening read for anyone interested in international religious freedom and the failures and triumphs of America’s contribution to it.
poetry

Revisiting Auden

By
Despite Professor Jacobs’s forceful defense of this book, my opinion remains unchanged. Buy Auden’s Collected Poems, regularly visit his poems from the 1930s, then patiently scour the rest of his work for more gold.
man reading fiction

The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature

By
By educating our sentiments—by wedding feeling and form, appetite and intellect—good literature moves us to love and hate what we ought to love and hate.
Students and tech

Subcontracting Our Minds 

By
As Rousseau put it, for the inhabitant of bourgeois society, it is necessary “to be or to seem.” AI will hand you the means to seem—at least so long as you are delivering the speech. It will deprive you of the ability to be.
tech and disembodiment

Technological Mediation in a Disembodied World: A Review of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience 

By
Technology does not merely present the real, like our bodily senses; instead, it re-presents, reproduces, copies, or simulates the real. This has concerned techno-conservatives for millennia, ever since Plato’s proposal to ban all “imitative arts” from his ideal city-state, and it is a concern naturally heightened in the era of AI deepfakes.
fancy car and house

Being Bougie

By
Living in a prosperous bourgeois society is not necessarily a problem; living with a bourgeois attitude on the inside is.
the globe

Ideology and Religion

By
If the purpose is to change the world, not merely to describe it, as Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach claims, then here we see something of what that means: the critique of religion is not simply for the purpose of demystifying or disenchanting the world. Rather, it is part of changing the world, of tearing down the illusions by which men and women shield themselves from having to face reality.
reading

The Bookshelf: Unputdownable

By
Just as a thrilling novel can keep us turning the pages, our interest rising all the while, so a work of history, philosophy, science, or politics can startle us with revelations of the truth that make us keep reading just as urgently.
Rome

Martin Rhonheimer, the Church’s Swiss Army Knife 

By
If Rhonheimer’s work never gets the appreciation it deserves, he has already changed the conversation in subtle ways. Modifying Oliver Wendell Holmes’s definition of a great thinker, I would wager that 100 years after Rhonheimer passes on, whether they know it or not, Catholic philosophers and theologians “will be moving to the measure of his thought.”
Israel flag

What Conservatives, Catholics, and All Americans Can Learn from Israel 

By
As the experience of many nations around the world shows, constitutions are easily dissolved, and constitutional order lost, when citizens allow their leaders to violate their charter to achieve partisan goals. When that happens, the delicate system of checks and balances usually gives way to an oppressive one-party rule. 
bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Taking an Incomplete

By
Readers, respect not the friends, critics, or even the judgments of posterity that insist on a book’s greatness. Enjoy what you read, and if you’re not enjoying yourself, stop, close the book, and go read something else.
the Aeneid

A Spiritual Aeneid

By
Readers will find in this book an insightful and witty commentary, suitable both for the serious student of the poem and for the layman reading it in translation. If it encourages anyone to read Virgil with fresh eyes or for the first time, it will have served its purpose.  
Church

Christian Institutions in a New World

By
Smith's book is an excellent reminder that conservatives should never prioritize an idealized individual or nation. Rather, we must work to preserve those institutions that point us to better lives.
Dawson

Religion and Revolution: Christopher Dawson and the “Great Awokening”

By
Like all secular revolutionary movements of the modern age, wokeism is a religion in denial. We will only put an end to the cycle of violent political revolution if we return to the Christian religion that gave birth to our civilization.
The Vatican

Across the Divide: M. Ciftci and Nathaniel Peters on Vatican II, Church–State Relations, and Political Participation 

By and
Christians should always make the best of any pragmatic agreements they can find with non-Christians on any issue. But the evangelical reasons why we support, for instance, constitutional government should be made clear, not veiled in embarrassment by translating them into the idiom of natural law or human dignity out of a misguided concern to avoid blurring the boundaries between political and religious affairs.
anxious kid

Taking The Anxious Generation Further

By
Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.
college dropoff

Empty Nests, Then and Now

By
If anyone older than Homer used the bird’s nest motif in a figurative sense, I have been unable to find it. His evocative imagery may seem familiar to modern readers, but this is deceptive insofar as it makes us think of the changes on the horizon for the parents whose primary child-rearing responsibilities are complete.
Evangelicalism

Megan Basham’s Civil War

By
My interest is not in striking a blow either for or against Basham and the like-minded folks who feel empowered and justified by her claims. Rather, I want to talk about why I think the book is important and how a more expansive framework might help us understand the strife and atmosphere of suspicion more accurately. 
back to school

Back to School: A Roundup of Our Top Essays on Education and Culture

By
Here are our editors' favorite essays on education, liberal arts, the university, and flourishing in college and in life.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved

Get your free eBook for The Human Person

"*" indicates required fields

Get your free eBook for Sexuality & Family

Get your free eBook for Politics & Law

Get your free eBook for Education & Culture

Get your free eBook for Business & Economics