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Pillar

The Human Person

The first pillar of a decent society is respect for the human person, which recognizes that all individual human beings have dignity simply because of the kind of being they are: animals whose rational faculties allow them to know, love, reason, and communicate. It also recognizes that human beings are persons, members of the human family who flourish in a community that respects their fundamental rights and who long to discover transcendent truths about the nature of reality.

The Best of Public Discourse: 2024

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C. S. Lewis and the Populists: A Birthday Appreciation

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At a moment when the values Lewis cherished often seem endangered as much by their supposed friends as by their proclaimed enemies, we would do well to remember his prescriptions.
tech use in the home

Technology in the Family Home: Add before You Subtract

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There is no shortage of opinions on how to manage the ubiquity of technology. Every parent will have his or her own opinion on these matters. But there is one key, frankly very uncomfortable, factor without which even the best of such ideas are sure to fail our kids: that at least in part, responsible technology use is caught, not taught. The modeling parents offer matters a great deal. And we do not always model well.
working moms

Flourishing in Work and Family Life: Considerations for Young Women 

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Six panelists share how they structure their lives in a way that allows them to pursue creative, intellectually inspiring work, while remaining open to life and faithful to the good work of the home.
Thanksgiving table

The Bookshelf: November Is for Gratitude

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November is a month for looking back in gratitude at where we have been, where we come from, who has trod the boards of our stage before us. Gratitude is the proper spirit to lift us up during these shorter, colder days (at least in these latitudes), while the seasonal life of nature turns with the leaves and falls with them to the ground.
Pope Benedict XVI

The Soul of the Sower

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Joseph Ratzinger looked at reality straight on, without blinders, neither a pessimist nor an optimist; with trepidation but always with Christian hope. He persevered, trusting in the promises of Christ as we must. He did so as almost all of us have to, without benefit of any special grace.
War in Ukraine

War in Ukraine and “Reasonable Hope for Success”

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The war in Ukraine is tragically costly to the Ukrainian nation. And success has not been, and will not be, within easy reach for Kyiv. But there is no reason to think that this defensive war does not satisfy the principles of just war tradition, and, in particular, the complicated principle of reasonable success.
The evangelical imagination

The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

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In one respect, Prior’s effort is to repristinate evangelicalism by disentangling the elements of the evangelical social imaginary “that are truly Christian” so they “can be better distinguished from those that are merely cultural.” Such an effort requires momentarily escaping the blindfold of the metaphors, stories, and images that mold our pre-cognitive intuitions and dispositions in order to see what is real. 
Ideas vs. people

Ideas vs. People?

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I am not sure a commitment to ideas or “ideologies” as such is at the root of our problem. If anything, public debate today has little patience with ideas, directed instead toward the very motives and character of the people one likes or dislikes.
Wheelchair

The Curious Rise in Disability: How Changing Language Alters the Nature of Reality

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By using such a broad understanding of disability, and therefore limiting conversation about other social, environmental, or economic factors, the state can both absolve itself of needing to provide real policy solutions and proclaim itself the protector of a victimized class.
relationships

A Requiem for Relationships

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Our culture’s sexual lens distorts the raison d’etre of society, leading teenagers to believe that the body and mind have no tie. 
Catholic Church in Nicaragua

Ortega and the Church: A Cautionary Tale

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The revolutionary priests bear more responsibility for the Church’s present hardship. They did not merely violate canon law; they did so for the sake of revolution. Now the Church is suffering under a dictator that that revolution produced. This should serve as a cautionary tale to would-be revolutionaries of all political stripes. To make revolution is to set in motion unpredictable and destructive forces from which one may not escape.
Alexandra Hudson, The Soul of Civility

Discovering the Soul of Civility: An Interview with Alexandra Hudson

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Politeness is manners, it’s technique, it’s etiquette, it’s behavior, it’s at the superficial, external level alone. But civility is a disposition of the heart. It’s a way of seeing others as our moral equals and treating them with the respect that they’re owed and deserve.
hostages

Hostages, Deterrence, and Israeli Strategy

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Israel’s obligations to its citizens still at liberty broaden its military options, because failure to strike militants holding hostages in Gaza means endangering civilians in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The judgments to be made here are vague and imperfect, but so long as the IDF doesn’t know hostages are going to die in a strike, a strike will often be the best way for Israel to execute its obligations to all Israelis.
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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I’ll certainly offer advice—my best account of what seems reasonable in the situation. But it is only advice: everyone who writes needs to make an independent assessment about whether the guidance I offer is sound.
family

Modern Families and the Messes We Make

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Assistive reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization not only involve serious medical risks, they also disrupt family life and commodify human beings.
Public Discourse

Public Discourse at 15: Resisting Evil without Losing Our Souls

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In the past fifteen years, we’ve published articles on the moral, cultural, religious, and political issues of our time, including the most controversial and sensitive; but we have done so in a manner of which we can be proud, respecting the intellect and personhood of our readers, interlocutors, and intellectual contestants.
theism

Sinners in the Hands of a Beautiful God

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In this new book—intended to bring Edwards “into the twenty-first century”—Marsden has returned to the Edwards he first discovered in his twenties. The New England thinker’s “invigorating emphasis on the dynamic beauty of God at the heart of reality” grabbed him then and has not let him go. As Marsden says, “You don’t get tired of beauty.”  
Vatican

Papal Power and the Obedience of the Faithful

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While a book like John Rist’s is diminished by its flaws, it’s not entirely unfair about our current moment.
mortal beauty

To What Serves Mortal Beauty?

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The dark side of overvaluing beauty is to seek to manipulate it into our own image, to manage it for ourselves. Hopkins says to leave it alone.
immanent frame

Life in the Ruins: Keeping Faith within the Immanent Frame 

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There is no romance without the real presence of God, no sacramental imagination without the sacraments, and the wonders of fantasy cannot be asserted of primary reality itself.
Death at 50

“Death” at Fifty: Ernest Becker and the Immortality Project

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By embracing the fact that we do not belong to ourselves, we are not “our own person,” we may discover that responsibility for our dignity in both life and death belongs to God and to others, as it does to our own choices. The acknowledgment of human vulnerability and dependence may well be the antidote to the fear and anxiety at the root of the modern denial of death. 
Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi, Father of Modernity

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Francis of Assisi teaches us that those who want to embrace the joys of this life must also embrace suffering. Our forgetfulness of this truth could explain the current crisis of our civilization.
Christian nationalism

A Gentler Christian Nationalism: Social Scientific Correctives to a Reductionistic Theory

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Various trends in American religion and right-wing politics further indicate that as the political influence of Christian nationalism is waxing, that of religious conservatism is waning. This need not be a fixed situation, but it does mean religious conservatives will have ample need of God’s grace as they consider how to avoid moral and spiritual compromise while navigating a particularly treacherous political landscape.
The Catholic Church

Human Rights and Old Temptations

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Spurred perhaps by a mixture of reactionary cultural sentiment and dissatisfaction with contemporary church authorities—and with the encouragement of outspoken postliberal voices—a predominantly younger and traditionally minded class of Catholics has begun to rediscover and reconsider the merits of these ideas. But the Catholic Church’s enduring support of human rights will not, and cannot, change.
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