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- Feed Preview Culture Archives - Public Discourse
Reclaiming Personhood in the Public Debate over IVF
As we consider the future of our debate over IVF, we must go deeper than the political questions facing us and ask ourselves fundamental questions about how we view one another.
Subcontracting Our Minds
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 wil...
Technological Mediation in a Disembodied World: A Review of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience
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, eve...
Screwtape on “My Embryo”
We may not be privy to Screwtape’s letters on the understanding of the meaning of the possessive pronoun “my” in “my embryo,” but judging from jurisprudential trends, we would be able t...
Being Bougie
Living in a prosperous bourgeois society is not necessarily a problem; living with a bourgeois attitude on the inside is.
Changing Minds about Same-Sex Union: A Critical Analysis of...Widening of God’s Mercy by Christopher Hays and Richard Hays
Christopher and Richard Hays have presented plausible arguments supported by biblical warrants for welcoming sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. Yet their mercy trajectory ap...
Man’s Search for Marriage
Gen Z's turn toward church may be unexpected, but it is actually rooted in the most natural drive of all: a desire for marriage and family. Young men are looking for truth and responsibility—an...
Defending Capital Punishment: A Response to Dennis Uhlman
Is Uhlman’s position that all executions for murder violate pro-life principles, or only executions for which there is some residual doubt of guilt, however small? In any system run by fallible...
Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?
Is government by consent irretrievably lost? I maintain that the principle of consent is not lost and that we can rebuild a different sort of social contract theory from amid the ruins.
What Is Settler Colonialism? A Q&A with Adam Kirsch
The only way to actually create a better future is to start with the world we actually live in and move forward—which may require “despairing” of the past, which cannot be changed.
Consciousness and Sedation at the End of Life
Consciousness is not simply a phenomenon that can be arbitrarily dispensed with or suppressed at whim: it is a critical element of the human experience, particularly in the last chapter of one’...
The Patience of Conservatism
This election will come and go, and the results will be, as usual, a mixed bag. There are better and worse alternatives, of course, and I have my own judgments and evaluations about such things, ...
Reflections on Avelut
Most Americans will not begin adopting avelut practices in any kind of wholesale manner. But it offers insights into the human condition that may nonetheless be helpful—about the timing of the ...
Evidence over Ideology: Gender-Distressed Children Deserve Nothing Less
When it comes to children’s health, ideology should never override evidence. Children who are distressed about their biological sex need evidence-based care that facilitates their journey to ad...
What Conservatives, Catholics, and All Americans Can Learn from Israel
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 ...
Pride and Concupiscence: An Excerpt from The Roots of Moral Evil by Dietrich von Hildebrand
If we are to understand how it is possible for someone to pursue the subjectively satisfying in such a way as to disrespect a good possessing a morally relevant value, we have to realize that in ...
To Die Well, We Must Live Well—And for Others
Living for others is hard for everyone, in any stage of life. And in a culture that exalts the autonomous self, it is hard to remember that sacrifice is the only path to flourishing.
A Spiritual Aeneid
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 ...
Religion and Revolution: Christopher Dawson and the “Great Awokening”
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 rel...
Across the Divide: M. Ciftci and Nathaniel Peters on Vatican II, Church–State Relations, and Political Participation
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 governm...
Taking The Anxious Generation Further
Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.
Reflections on Israel’s Exceptional Fertility
The enduring source of the Children of Israel’s exceptional, future-oriented natalism is their intense, equally exceptional rootedness in their shared past.
Does America Need a Sharansky?
Unfortunately, Morson looks only at a handful of symptoms that are vaguely comparable to the pathologies of late Soviet society and concludes that the same disease is at work. He does not address...
Empty Nests, Then and Now
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 inso...