I continue to believe that our best path forward is to respect one another and to avoid the constant temptation to engage in emotional and political manipulation from the left and right.| Public Discourse
Chernow’s biography denies us the gift that Mark Twain would so generously bestow on his fellow Americans. For her 250th birthday, America deserves better.| Public Discourse
Communal consent is usually necessary to authorize civil leaders to make governmental decisions for the whole community, and that this is a demand of general justice on the part of the purported authorities themselves.| Public Discourse
We change a culture by first changing ourselves; by knowing our faith, trusting God, and then actually living and defending what we claim to believe, whatever the cost.| Public Discourse
Young conservatives can learn a great deal from Flynn’s account of Meyer’s life.| Public Discourse
Death Revisionism—including the kind Drs. Jauhar, Patel, and Smith propose—is not an ethically viable option. Of that, I think, we can be relatively confident. Of the options that remain, however, there is not one that asserts itself as the obvious alternative.| Public Discourse
I agree with Professor Tollefsen that we should seek a morally consistent approach to organ donation, and one that does not involve intentional killing. I also agree that this leads us to the conclusion that existing criteria for ethical organ donation after cardiac death are untenable. These patients don’t seem to be dead in any metaphysical sense and so it is difficult to say that the Dead Donor Rule is being respected in these cases.| Public Discourse
Our public policy should be based on the biological truth about death, and the moral truths governing permissible and impermissible actions. We should not let policy desires drive our factual claims about when death takes place.| Public Discourse
Whatever else one might say about the therapy bans in question, they undeniably burden the free exercise of religion for same-sex-attracted or gender-confused persons who seek not to identify with or live according to those conditions.| Public Discourse
As institutions examine their DEI initiatives and consider what to keep and what to eliminate, they should do so with the purpose of the university in mind. If they do, they’ll see that, consistent with public opinion, DEI has a role to play. Properly ordered, it should focus on goals like promoting access to the life of the mind and ensuring that people from all walks of life feel welcome on campuses.| Public Discourse
Death must never be reduced to content. To promote the general welfare in our age means to place the soul of the nation above the gatekeepers of the algorithm.| Public Discourse
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, but Congress should make a law abridging the freedom of Pornhub.| Public Discourse
The whole world is God’s creation, an expression of his love. The truth about ourselves as dependent creatures who he loves, whom he sent his Son to redeem, is out there for us. We can blind ourselves to it, we can ignore it, but it’s very loud. And the more we help each other see it, the happier we will ultimately be.| Public Discourse
The latest elite orthodoxy threatens children’s minds, bodies, and family relationships. It is time for the high court to clarify that parents—not the government, unions, or advocacy groups—are the primary decisionmakers for children’s education, upbringing, and care.| Public Discourse
In the end, Siraganian’s seven theses mostly collapse from their own structural inadequacy as arguments. Sneers, exaggerations, false comparisons, and non sequiturs are what her theses have going for them. In these respects, she neatly illustrates the need for the intellectual challenge viewpoint diversity promises, on her own campus and others.| Public Discourse
Commitment to America as a whole must come one of two ways—as a “community of communities” in which one’s sympathy for the nation comes channeled through a commitment to locality; or through ideological abstraction.| Public Discourse
In a culture that has forgotten the sacred, to see with the eyes of moral imagination is a quiet revolution. And it is one my generation desperately needs.| Public Discourse
My generation needs help discerning what the good life truly is.| Public Discourse
I wish my elders knew that, in the face of what seems to be an increasingly frightening technocratic reality, we want to live free from deceit and as true humans.| Public Discourse
I have been strongly drawn to pick up several recent books of history and historiography that tackle anachronisms and reifications, because such clarifying works can keep us from making facile conclusions about the past—and about its effect on the present.| Public Discourse
If stillborn children could inspire one of the most-loved children’s books in the twentieth century, then maybe a grandpa with dementia will inspire one of the best stories in the twenty-first.| Public Discourse
Lewis is needed, now more than ever, to help men and women of faith move “further up and further in.” Jews will be much better off for the journey with him.| Public Discourse
If Augustine’s two cities can’t be neatly mapped onto the modern distinction between Church and State, how can his thought help illumine Church-State relations?| Public Discourse
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 d| Public Discourse
