We might say that the fundamental objective of architecture is to reconcile: a beautifully planned village will always have a church that celebrates the reconciliation between God and man that was won on Calvary. Moreover, its streets will be lined with houses that symbolize identity amid difference. In other words, to build in defiance of the street is to shatter identity in favor of difference. It is to alienate neighbor from neighbor and to champion the “I” over the “we.” It is to scream that my taste far outweighs the importance of living in harmony with those who share a common homestead. It is to opt for estrangement over belonging, disruption over reconciliation, and ego over community.

The question was never whether gay Americans were owed dignity; of course, they were and are. The serious question was whether a child’s interest in her own mother and father could survive a legal regime constructed on the premise that neither is essential.

Yuval Levin’s call for institutional renewal is not just relevant in the age of AI. It is urgent. Levin argues that many of the social problems facing society today originate from the replacement of formative institutions with performative platforms. AI can intensify this problem even further: it can accelerate the bypassing of institutions as well as amplify the magnitude of performative voices. When performance replaces formation, competence is simulated rather than cultivated. Thus, if these institutions continue to decay, the human capacity to serve as assayers will continue to diminish.

Therefore, we have a choice before us. One path leads to the illusion of capability: fool’s gold. The other path leads to genuine capability amplified beyond what was previously thought possible: true gold.

Consider a use of AI that is a part of many of our day-to-day lives: autopilot in commercial aviation. We board the plane, go through the safety instructions, take-off, drink a ginger ale, and land. We never think about the autopilot. We trust it not because the technology is infallible, but because we trust the pilots, the assayers, in the cockpit. Those pilots have earned our trust; they have gone through an institution, earned their pilot’s license, completed rigorous training, and continue to be tested to ensure competence. We trust the tool because we trust the wielder, the formed human in the loop.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

On the theme of constitutionalism, the year 2026 also marks the 250th anniversary of John Adams’s pamphlet, Thoughts on Government (“Thoughts”), a work that proved to be influential on American constitutionalism. The claim that John Adams was influential on American constitutionalism seems strange, given that Adams was not even present at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, Adams had a tremendous influence on the governmental structures of several state constitutions, many of which, in turn, influenced the federal Constitution. Adams’s influence can be traced to two documents: Thoughts, published in 1776, and the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, of which he was the principal drafter. Political theorist Brad Thompson writes that Adams had a demonstrable influence on the state constitutions of North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts.

[B]uried beneath the headlines about rocket launches and lunar orbits was a quieter story—one that should unsettle anyone who cares about the long-term future of our civilization. Syracuse University recently announced that it plans to eliminate a sweeping range of academic programs, including classics, Italian, French, and German. The justification, as it almost always is in these cases, is financial. The programs don’t generate enough revenue. They don’t produce enough majors. In the cold arithmetic of twenty-first-century higher education, they don’t justify their own existence.

For many scholars, the word “person,” as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, requires a birth. They proceed as though the mere act of exiting a womb confers not just moral, philosophical, or theological worth, but legal rights as well. Speaking about her recent book, Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction, Professor Mary Ziegler acknowledges she doesn’t challenge whether an unborn child is “biologically human or alive”—she takes that as a given; her gripe is about whether the child is entitled to “constitutional rights” before being born. She is not alone. Even leading conservatives, like the late Judge Bork, have pushed the view “that those who adopted [the Thirteenth and Fourteenth] Amendments addressed only the rights of persons who had been born.” And since then others, like Ed Whelan, have voiced agreement with Bork’s view, too. But skepticism about pre-birth personhood was perhaps best captured by how Justice Antonin Scalia once (rather flippantly) put it during an interview with 60 Minutes, quipping: “I think when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons.”

Shakespeare’s audience would not have needed persuading that marriage was a good thing, worthy of pursuing. They understood it implicitly. It is tragic that we don’t; not anymore. It is meet and right that we make the case, articulate what is true, that marriage is a great good, a great blessing, worthy of pursuit and cultivation. Neither would Shakespeare’s audience have thought it a non sequitur that Benedick exclaims in the same breath as marriage, “The world must be peopled.” Marriage and children should go together: Rightly conceived, marriage always ought to be open to life.

Without the American commitment to the religious freedom of everyone, including traditional religious believers, we will no longer be the America of our founding. We will continue our descent from unity into political and cultural fragmentation and chaos. Some of us will turn to authoritarianism and support an end to our great experiment in constitutional democracy.

In the end, academic freedom cannot be reduced to a slogan or a rulebook, because it is a condition of corporate intellectual life. It can only exist in an institution brave enough to be what it claims to be, and humble enough to admit that truth is not its own invention. The most liberating thing a Catholic university can say is not “anything goes,” but “come and see.” It will have to say, without apology, that some truths are not negotiable because reality is not manmade. And it will have to say, with equal clarity, that no one is forced to submit, because coerced submission is not true membership at all.

It’s easy enough to be a critic, sniping from the bleachers as a journalist or prophet, when you’ve left the institutions of civil society or have little to do with them. But we who live and work in them must take a different approach. It is irresponsible and dangerous to call for attack and revolution without considering everything that has gone into our existing social order, which still has much health in it—especially at the local level; especially among people who live and work together in “analog” communities.

Religion may indeed become optional in modern America. But the longings it once shaped remain. The question is whether Americans will continue leaning on politics to save them, will recover a renewed sense of proportion, remembering that politics is necessary, important, and limited. A healthier political culture may begin not with greater ideological fervor, but with deeper humility about what can and cannot redeem. For when politics becomes our highest love, it will also become our cruelest disappointment, leaving our homes colder, our holidays lonelier, and our common life harder to sustain.

And only when our hopes are rightly ordered can our shared life endure without demanding from Caesar what belongs only to God.

I still remember my first check-up without my mom at age thirteen. The nurse asked me two questions: “When was your last period?” and “Are you sexually active?” When I said no to the latter question, I received a smile and confirmation that if that changed, I could call for a prescription for birth control—they wouldn’t need to share the details with my mom. Doctors didn’t ask a single question about my pain, mood swings, or menstrual cycles. If I wasn’t sexually active, then my reproductive health didn’t matter.

The reason for this discrepancy in healthcare is simple: those writing the medical standards are the same people making money off women perpetually on hormonal birth control—and the same ones who write that the “treatment” for a diagnosis of infertility is IVF.

I don’t entirely blame doctors for doing this. They are just doing what they’ve been taught to do. It’s a common story: put the teen on birth control for acne, mood swings, or any number of issues, and tell her that it will even out her hormones because that’s what the studies say. In fact, 33 percent of teen girls on the pill state they are on it for non-contraceptive reasons.

What no one is telling these girls, however, is that when symptoms like pelvic pain, excessive bleeding, and hormonal imbalance are happening chronically, taking hormonal birth control isn’t actually stopping a disease from growing. In fact, contraceptives have actually been associated with a worsening of conditions and a delay in diagnosis and treatment for myriad reproductive dysfunctions.

Throughout my entire experience in the standard medical system, not a single doctor told me that debilitating pain or the serious pits of depression I would fall into could actually be a reflection of something deeper going on. No one told me that by masking pain with NSAIDS instead of investigating it, I could be putting my future fertility at risk.

Perhaps the greatest gift any parent can give their child is being able to tell them “I love you just the way you are.” By turning children into a consumer good like any other, our new era of eugenic embryo screening has the potential to introduce an element of contingency into that declaration, the uncomfortable undercurrent of concern that maybe, if your genetic profile had looked slightly different, your parents wouldn’t have selected you over the other embryos created at the same time as you.

It’s obvious that, for good reason, women don’t like our pornified sexual culture. But it’s not easy to coordinate a society-wide renegotiation of its terms. And so the sexual and relational landscape is increasingly bleak and barren. Americans are less likely to be married, or even partnered, and they report having less, and less satisfying, sex. Instead of the happiness, authenticity, and pleasure that sexual liberation promised, there is a loneliness epidemic and sexual dysfunction as men and women are driven further apart.

Even after marriage, we can model the intentional, messy, beautiful work of partnership—date nights, vulnerable conversations, respectful disagreement, and repair when conflict arises. When young people see us showing up in relationships—not perfectly, but intentionally—they begin to internalize that relational growth is ongoing and imperfect. We can help normalize the entire dating process, presenting it as something worth investing in and iterating, much like a job interview, a musical instrument, or a sport.

Scholarly evidence supports this approach. A recent systematic review of interventions aimed at promoting healthy romantic relationships among youth (ages twelve through twenty-five) analyzed twenty-seven program studies and found that most interventions increased knowledge about healthy relationship practices, though effects on changing deeper beliefs or behaviors were more inconsistent. This suggests that teaching relational theory and vocabulary is a necessary first step—but not sufficient on its own. Programs that incorporate skills practice, feedback, role-play, and repeated exposure tend to fare better at translating knowledge into behavior.

Both comprehensive sex education (which emphasizes contraception) and sexual risk avoidance education (which emphasizes abstinence) have historically been laser-focused on teaching adolescents how to avoid pregnancy. Several realities, however, have revealed this to be a short-sighted approach. Numerous studies in the past few years have shown that our teens are graduating from high school with tremendous misconceptions about their reproductive biology. Infertility in American couples is a growing concern, with now up to 16 percent of married women receiving a diagnosis of infertility, as the birthrate continues to decline. If we want strong, traditional families with lots of children tomorrow, we must teach young people to care for their health and fertility today—without defaulting to Big Pharma or IVF as the only path forward. Education in body literacy is one possible solution.

[T]hough advocates may rarely acknowledge it, neurodiversity paradigms tend to diminish the experience of those with moderate or significant disability. Because it emphasizes social support and acceptance, the concept of neurodiversity is most applicable to those whose needs can be met through accommodation or changing of social or behavioral expectations. It is far less applicable to individuals or families who are dealing with significant needs or who require intensive interventions to address basic functions (feeding tubes, communication devices, intensive medical management, or inpatient psychiatric needs). Think, for example, of a teenager with significant motor and developmental disabilities who cannot walk, eat, or speak independently. Addressing discriminatory attitudes is important, but it is certainly not sufficient to support this person. We see this tension in recent discussions of the growing movement to separate out diagnostic categories for autism, where neurodiversity advocacy sometimes crowds out the voices of those with more significant impacts on functioning.

Coolidge did not plead for special favors on behalf of Jews, but for a return to the biblical precepts he believed would bless the nation. This plea doubled as a warning: in a troubled anniversary year, when the nation was fatigued by war and wary of the future, it might succumb to ancient hatreds and jealousies inherent to the human heart and fall into disarray. Or it could make sense of things another way, remembering the diverse elements present at the founding, including the Jews who sacrificed their lives or fortunes to the revolutionary effort. One hundred years on, Coolidge’s message captures some of the best of American conservatism: a frank and grateful appraisal of the past combined with a religious spirit that embraces religious toleration.

[T]he original meaning of the word virtue is a good habit, particularly a habit of excellence. The reason this is significant is, if we understand that virtues are habits that anyone can acquire through practice, then virtue is no longer this abstract ideal that we’re aspiring to, but something we can all do and become. If you want to grow in restraint, for example, each day, practice some small effort of restraint and steadily you will build the virtue of restraint, like you would build a muscle. The virtues are like psychological or spiritual muscles, which all of us already have, but which have to be exercised to be strengthened.

Ancient civilizations knew this. The ancient Greeks and Romans would habituate themselves to virtues like courage and wisdom; they would practice them and honor them. The virtues became a sort of human operating system, underlying every personal and social achievement. This was true for almost every major civilization through the millennia, until a couple of hundred years ago, when we started to abandon the pursuit of virtue.

Alasdair MacIntyre tells this story in After Virtue. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying the book, his argument is that virtue had become associated with religion and was rejected during the Enlightenment, along with many other things religious. MacIntyre explains that people in the past shared a clear idea of what the virtues were and why they mattered. Virtues were habits that helped people live good lives, guided by traditions and communities. Over time, however, the Enlightenment tried to rebuild a sense of morality using reason alone, and that project failed utterly. MacIntyre argues it failed because reason alone could not give people strong, agreed-upon rules for how to live. The result was a moral world where people often talk about values, rights, and maybe even virtues, but these words lack any real foundation.

“Against the world.” That’s the nature of an entrepreneur. They’re looking at the world entirely differently. And in most cases, entrepreneurs are providing a superior outcome at a lower cost. There are times that it’s a higher cost, but even if it’s a higher cost, it’s a superior outcome. So yes, entrepreneurs, people who are willing to make a contribution, who are willing to take risks, are the whole basis of an economy. And if you don’t have those entrepreneurs, you have a socialistic economy.

A way out is for young people to figure out how they can make a contribution at whatever level, within companies, within organizations, within churches. And, as you stated, it needs to come from the ground up; it’s not going to come out of the federal government. It needs to come from the individual. And, as you probably know, in modern-day colleges, they talk about collaboration, as if people sitting around at a table would figure anything out. And there was a comment by Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. He said that if you put five intelligent people around a table, you’re going to get the lowest common denominator; you’re going to get bad ideas. But one of those people at the table might say, “Here’s the best idea, here’s how it needs to be done.” That’s what entrepreneurship is. It’s not a blending of things down to where everybody feels good. It’s about unique ideas.

As my children will happily confirm, I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to popular culture, which means I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to the swift changes that our ever-malleable English language undergoes. Thus, it took me the better part of six months to finally get what “woke” means. And it was only a few weeks ago that I finally understood the image of moving or opening the “Overton Window”: an image for expanding the range of acceptable political language and ideas in order to advance a particular agenda. With my new knowledge of Overton Windows at hand, let me conclude by saying this: The Overton Window with respect to anti-Semitic language, tropes, images, and concepts has been opened far too wide over the past several years and it is our solemn duty to slam it shut.

It is our patriotic duty to our country, whose already-fragile civic culture is being further weakened by the Jew-haters, who are also making true learning difficult if not impossible in many institutions of higher learning.

It is our civic duty to our fellow citizens of the stock of Abraham, who, not without difficulty, have nonetheless been fully participant in the American democratic experiment for centuries, as witnessed by George Washington’s 1790 “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island,” in which the first president affirmed (in a reference to Micah 4:4) that, in the new nation, “every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

And for the Christians among us, it is our religious duty to those whom John Paul II called, at the Grand Synagogue of Rome, our “elder brothers” in faith.

Let us do our duty. Let us slam shut and then nail shut the Overton Window on anti-Semitism and thereby help give our country a new birth of freedom rightly understood.

Right-wing young men see a politics and culture that celebrates every identity but theirs, cultivates a totalitarian ideological culture that directly undermines their beliefs, desires, and life goals, and is set to leave them significantly worse off—socially, economically, culturally, spiritually—than their grandparents. Any successful attempt to reach these young men will need to seriously address these deeply rooted sentiments.