Check out these recent articles from around the web:

As Fellow Pro-Lifers, We Are Begging Marco Rubio to Save Foreign Aid by Leah Libresco Sargeant, Matthew Loftus, Kristin M. Collier, and Kathryn Jean Lopez: “PEPFAR is the kind of world-reshaping project that only America can achieve. In the next 50 years, we should see the end of any baby contracting H.I.V. from his or her mother. Don’t throw away this incredible victory.”

Killing U.S.A.I.D. Is a Win for Autocrats Everywhere by Samantha Power: “We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history. Less than three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, he, Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have halted the U.S. Agency for International Development’s aid programs around the world. In so doing, they have imperiled millions of lives, thousands of American jobs and billions of dollars of investment in American small businesses and farms while severely undermining our national security and global influence — all while authoritarians and extremists celebrate their luck.”

The Hero and other Cultural Characters by Chris Arnade: “People don’t simply want what the modern Liberal project believes they want, which is ever increasing material wealth and a Libertarian individuality whose end point is emancipation from any and all communal norms. People do want material wealth, but that alone isn’t enough, because they also need to feel a sense of purpose aligned to the Good, and for men that means some version of being a hero, which is especially incoherent to the modern academic worldview that emphasizes individuality, because it requires being a part of a community, since it is an act of selflessness, where the hero trades their physical suffering for communal praise and status.”

Believe for Your Own Sake, Not for “the West” by Țara Isabella Burton: “Intellectually-speaking, memetic Christianity, with a dose of well-managed, private Nietzschean hedonism might well be the most sensible philosophical framework on which to build a lasting society, to preserve the dignity of the human person, and provide sufficient psychological solace for people’s “God-shaped hole.” And there are times, when my own faith wavers, that the affirmation of faith — the decision to believe even when I struggle to believe; the belief that it is right and good to believe in this, sustains me in times of doubt. But to treat Christianity as merely a useful memetic force to resist modern decline is only to hasten it: to preach a gospel predicated on a Word synonymous not with divine creative reality but human fictive speculation. To turn the ten commandments into Twelve Simple Rules is to cede what Christianity has, and Remixed religion doesn’t: the chance that it might be actually true. If it’s not, after all, then what’s the point?”

Racial Unity Is Out of Style by Justin Giboney: “With that context, it’s time to consider how race relations in the American church have actually worsened over the past half decade or so. The sentiment seems to have shifted in such a significant way that the once-popular racial-reconciliation project is now passé in many spaces. Even the term racial reconciliation feels corny and cringeworthy to some. But the problem is much bigger than semantics: I see the church’s racial and partisan divide growing at a moment when society most needs an example of a Christian ethic that destroys racial barriers and the dividing walls of partisan hostility (Eph. 2:14).”

Pornography Shouldn’t Be So Easy for Kids to Access by Elizabeth Bruenig: “In fact, porn is so ubiquitous online that it’s tempting to dismiss the preponderance of porn available to children as mainly harmless in most cases—a rite of passage for kids growing up on the internet. But childhood exposure to porn is a public-health concern with serious, long-term ramifications for children. Their interests are essentially collateral damage in adults’ right to consume porn as they please, and a massive industry’s interest in preserving its billions of dollars a year in revenue.”

The Constitutional Crisis Is Here by Jonathan Chait: “Sometimes a constitutional crisis sneaks up on you, shrouded in darkness, revealing itself gradually. Other times it announces itself dramatically. Elon Musk, to whom Donald Trump has delegated the task of neutering the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution, could hardly be more obvious about his intentions if he rode into Washington on a horse trailed by Roman legions.”

Democrats need a bigger tent on abortion by Frank Barry: “And the party seems unable to recognize — or countenance — that a big tent approach on abortion would help it reclaim areas that have gone from blue to red. In 2024, Democrats for Life’s political action committee endorsed 39 candidates; 37 of them won.”

Legal Weed Didn’t Deliver on Its Promises by Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys: “Legalization has raised cannabis consumption dramatically, and also altered patterns of use. In the 1990s and early 2000s, most consumers smoked the drug and did so only occasionally or semi-regularly—say, on weekends with friends. Some people used more regularly, of course: In 2000, 2.5 million Americans reported daily or near-daily cannabis use. But by 2022, that had grown sevenfold to 17.7 million. Remarkably, that’s more than the 14.7 million who reported using alcohol that often. Today, more than 40 percent of Americans who use cannabis take it daily or near-daily, and these users consume perhaps 80 percent of all the cannabis sold in the U.S. The drug’s potency has also risen sharply. Until the year 2000, the average potency of seized cannabis never exceeded 5 percent THC, the principal intoxicant in the plant. Today, smokeable buds, or flower, sold in licensed stores usually exceed 20 percent THC. Vapes, dabs, and shatter—all of which are forms of drug delivery that commercialization spread—are more potent still.”

Democrats have become the party of permissiveness. That’s ballot box poison. by Rahm Emanuel: “Clinton and Obama, the only two Democratic presidents to be reelected since Franklin D. Roosevelt, took stances that were in the mainstream of political sentiment, and both were willing to confront allied interest groups demanding fidelity and orthodoxy to out-of-touch positions despite the attendant criticism. In demonstrating that strength, they made voters comfortable electing and returning them to the Oval Office.”

We Thought We Were Compassionate, but We Were Too Permissive by Nicholas Kristof: “Drew made poor choices, but there’s plenty of blame to go around. Conservatives resisted the social safety net that might have helped him in childhood, and liberals coddled him with a nonjudgmental tolerance that mired him in addiction. Whatever our politics, we all need a rethink.”

Is the trad Catholic trend about tradition — or about individual proclivities? by Stephen G. Adubato: “Much of traditionalist Catholic rhetoric is predicated on an antagonistic relationship with “modernism” (as well as postmodernism), taking their cues from the encyclicals of Popes Pius IX and X. While I share some of their reservations about modernist thought, I fear that this attitude is more reactionary than it is based in critical engagement. Reactionary discourse that fails to develop into a more nuanced engagement morphs it into its mirror opposite; different on the surface, but the same in essence.”