Conscience
MacIntyre argued we live amid the fragments of a broken moral tradition. His remedy is stark: rebuild communities of practice where virtues can endure, even as larger culture drifts into incoherence.
Foreign Affairs
At 80, the UN faces not just a budget crisis but an epistemic one. Its only path to legitimacy lies in knowledge—rigorous, transparent, indispensable. Either it becomes an analytical superpower or drifts into irrelevance.
Poetry
How a forgotten Polish exile became John Paul II’s moral compass—and why his austere vision of liberty matters for democracy today
Freedom
Hannah Arendt’s warning from 1958—humanity may conquer the stars yet lose the world beneath its feet—resounds in an era of automation, algorithms, and fragile political action. In 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition, a meditation written in the long shadow of totalitarianism and at the dawn
Freedom
What a “brain-rot summer” tells us about shared meaning, pluralism and democracy. In August 2025, Business Insider christened the season “brain-rot summer”: no runaway blockbuster, no dominant fashion note, and—tellingly—no “song of the summer.” Culture felt squishy, individualized, algorithmically sliced. The verdict named a discomfort many felt but
Conscience
How a young Pole—orphan, laborer, actor, priest—armed his conscience with verse and learned to defend human freedom from Nazism, Communism, and our age of noise. In brutal times it is easy to think culture is a luxury. Karol Wojtyła (1920–2005) knew better. Before he became John Paul
Breaking with Marx
From Party prodigy to dissident sage, Kołakowski’s journey shows how the courage to doubt can be freedom’s deepest defense. Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) lived a life that could be read as the intellectual autobiography of the twentieth century itself: born in the ruins of war, drawn into Marxist
Breaking with Marx
How one of the 20th century’s most radical philosophers abandoned Marxist utopianism for Aristotelian tradition and Thomistic faith. "I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?"
How the “tyranny of the majority” has migrated into our online public squares Tocqueville’s Tyranny of the Majority in the Digital Age When Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America (1835), he warned of a new kind of despotism. The danger was not kings or emperors but the collective
Conscience
Hammarskjöld’s Markings shows that true leadership is rooted in humility, integrity, and service. His legacy reminds us that moral authority flows not from power, but from the courage to surrender self for others.
Faith and Reason
How a 12th-century dialogue between two great Muslim thinkers continues to shape the region’s choices today. A Debate That Still Resonates In the late eleventh century, the great theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali published Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). It was a masterful critique of those who, influenced
Freedom
Boaz reminds us liberty is not a bunker but a port city—confident, cosmopolitan, and outward-facing. Peace, trade, and humility in power are its pillars; connection, not coercion, is its compass.