This week from Ethika Politika, our friends, and around the web. Compiled by David Mills.

Editorials


We are pleased to announce the addition to the staff of three gifted young people. As Andrew Haines writes in Welcoming Our New 2015 Staff, an important part of the work of Ethika Politika is to mentor younger people with a vocation to the intellectual and writing life. We welcome Audra Nakas as the Via Sapientiae Fellow, Alexandra DeSanctis as a junior editor, and Timothy Kirchoff as a new contributing editor.

As new staff, Audra and Alexandra were asked to write editorials on Ethika Politika's theme of wisdom and prudence.

The student's vocation isn't just to discern what she's supposed to do, as if one's calling is something in the future, writes Alexandra in Answering Christ's Call. The student is called to be a student, which has very practical implications for how the student lives and works.

In Wisdom, Prudence, and the Search for the Good, Audra explained that prudence meant making choices that wisdom required. She was surprised to find that this sometimes led her to do things that seemed imprudent from the academic point of view.

Michael Bradley has found that being a young man serious about your faith gets you pegged by many as a future priest. Of course priests should try to live holy lives, but not every man who lives that way should be a priest, he points out in A Lingering Clericalism?


From Ethika Politika


The Tests Have Failed. There is nothing magical about testing and certainly nothing magical about the particular tests given schoolchildren, explains Sam Rocha. The testing regime has enriched certain business, however.

The Absurdity of Non-Transgenderism. Offering a "critique of a critique" in response to a criticism of transgenderism published on Public Discourse, Christopher Damian argues that the question of what sex some people are is far more difficult to answer than many conservatives realize.

DNA and Transgenderism. Replying to Christopher Damian, Janet E. Smith argues that he does not establish the generic basis for sexual identity upon which his argument depends.

Theology of the Body and "Ontological Gender". Also replying to Damian, Rachel Meyer uses St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body to argue that a physical male is still a male even if he doesn't have a completely masculine experience of his identity.

The Conversion of Paul Ryan. Timothy Kirchoff examines the congressman's project of listening to other voices speaking about poverty and race, and the effect it seems to have had on him.

From Our Writers, Editors, and Friends


Patrick Deneen's Is Academic Freedom Inherently Good? from The Imaginative Conservative (published in March but we weren't doing this then).

Elizabeth Stoeker Bruenig's The Deterioration of the Christian Right is Imminent from The New Republic.

David Mills' The Monstrous Dr. Cutler from Aleteia.

Leah Lebresco's The Quiet, Secluded Grace of Confession from Crux.

Peter Augustine Lawler's More Thoughts About the End of Mad Men from NRO.

Barbara McClay's Tipping Points from The Hedgehog Review.

Other Articles on Our Concerns


Rachel Laudan's A Plea for Culinary Modernism from Jacobin.

Anthony Esolen's The Difference Bewteen the Humanitarian and the Faithful Servant of Christ (on St. Martin de Porres) from The Stream

Kathryn Ecclestone's The Miserable Rise of the Happiness Industry from Spiked!.