Public Discourse

My latest article for @PublicDiscourse - Romans 13 and the American Revolution "As St. Augustine reminds us, “men build cities, and men destroy cities, but there is also the City of God, and that’s where we all belong.” Christians live in both. The task is not to sanctify our politics, but to order them rightly in light of that higher allegiance." thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100984

Romans 13 and the American Revolution thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100984/

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/04/100753/ Any fair-minded observer had to conclude that Witherspoon made good on that promise of the Declaration’s signers: “We pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Authenticity, RIP: Lionel Trilling Revisited thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100973/

permalink} The decisive question for this and every age, Trueman argues, is Who and what is Man?

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100919/ In recent decades, many have committed themselves to the recovery and practice of classical education.

Against Excarnation thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100961/

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/04/100737/ How do we reaffirm and communicate our nation’s best ideals on its quarter-millennium birthday?

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100908/ Only a revitalization of the richness of Christian marriage will suffice as a bulwark against the insanity, exploitation, and selfishness of the gender and sexual revolutions.

Betting on God thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100951/

Women subjected to the structural violence of mail-order abortion deserve justice. My debut at @PublicDiscourse lands as the Supreme Court considers the Fifth Circuit’s stay on the 2023 REMS which removed the drug’s in-person dispensing requirement. thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100930/

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100893/ Which path will we choose?

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/04/100723/ I would insist on an institutional realism that the book avoids: the current U.S. political environment has already produced a markedly more interventionist federal posture toward higher education.

From Promised Autonomy to Delivered Harm: Structural Violence in the Era of Mail-Order Abortion Drugs thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100930/

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/04/100714/ A conservative judge who retires now denies Fortune the spin of her wheel. Of course, as Seneca observed, there are always outside forces you can’t control. Earl Warren couldn’t predict the Fortas debacle.

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100883/ Laura K. Field’s work Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a troubling survey of various political-intellectual groups on the right. These are groups that led American conservatives to help “foment” Donald Trump’s election victories.

What sort of character did John Wayne play? Why is he always a man out of place in his movies? On Madison's Notes, guest @MatthewJFranck shows why to host @RyanShinkel, especially with the classic, The Searchers (1956). For the rest of the episode, see here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s5e…

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/04/100704/ "Charlie" is one of the thousands of humans who will have been gestated entirely in an artificial womb. He can point to no moment when he ever entered a womb, nor any moment when he left one. Charlie, strictly speaking, was never born.

thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/04/100866/ The left may not have much nostalgia for a specific historical moment, but it appears to believe in an atemporal condition of purity or innocence. And it is from this perspective that it seeks to judge the past.

The History of Education in Six Words thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/05/100919/