People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree – even about matters of profound human and moral significance.

Art can elevate and ennoble. It can also degrade and even corrupt. Whatever should be done or not done by way of legal restriction of pornographic art, we ought not to make things easy on ourselves by pretending that art cannot be pornographic or that pornographic art cannot degrade. Nor ought we to avert our gaze from the peculiar insult and injustice involved in the government funding of pornography.

Is it actually the case that no one can tell you with any degree of authority when the life of a human being actually begins? No, it is not. Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.

The thoughts are to the desires,” Hobbes has taught them to suppose, “as scouts and spies, to range abroad and find the way to the thing desired.

Cultivate friends you disagree with, as well as those with whom you agree, because together you’ll locate the soft spots in your own thinking and find common ground to build on.

Although both my grandfathers encountered ethnic prejudice, they viewed this as an aberration – a failure of some Americans to live up to the nation’s ideals. It did not dawn on them to blame the bad behavior of some Americans on America itself. On the contrary, America in their eyes was a land of unsurpassed blessing. It was a nation of which they were proud and happy to become citizens.

We’re informed the Church must “update” its moral teachings to stay relevant, but then discover that a good many converts enter the Church precisely because her moral theology offers sanity, humanity, and a path to human flourishing.

Personal authenticity, in the classical understanding of liberal-arts education, consists in self-mastery – in placing reason in control of desire. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires – it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.

The freedom we must defend is freedom for the practice of these virtues. It is freedom for excellence, the freedom that enables us to master ourselves. It is a freedom that, far from being negated by rigorous standards of scholarship, demands them. It is not the freedom of “if it feels good, do it”; it is, rather, the freedom of self-transcendence, the freedom from slavery to self.