Past Issues

In his 1978 Harvard address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke as a survivor of the terrors of “hard totalitarianism” under the Soviet state, but he warned of a softer version, emerging from different, less obvious agents of control. This “soft totalitarianism,” enforced by the media, the academy, and corporations, was no less dangerous than its communist counterpart; it was undermining the spiritual freedom of the West. Today, there are individuals and institutions—whether totalitarians of some stripe or merely “influencers”—attempting to manipulate what we do, say, and think, often against the claims of conscience and the transcendent moral order. To recover our sense of dignity and agency over against the likes of the biomedical security state, surveillance capital, or gender ideologues, might well, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, “demand from us a spiritual blaze.”

Clifford Geertz once observed that law is a way of “imagining the real,” that it offers “visions of community” rather than “echoes of it.” If so, then the gender debates represent more than clashes between interest groups. At stake: what do we think is real?

This special edition presents some of the papers given at a recent colloquium on U.S. v. Skrmetti, which was decided by the Supreme Court on June 18, 2025. The case concerns a Tennessee law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones on children. The Supreme Court's upholding of this law has profound implications.

The principle recognizing the prerogative of parents to educate their children is no longer just a haven from the tyranny of the State. The “right” itself has become an arbitrary claim, with “gender-affirming” parents appealing to it as proxies of their children’s “right to choose.” And the “parents” bearing the right are, increasingly, those who choose children—producing and buying them—not the ones who have them. Unless parents’ rights are grounded in the authority mothers and fathers possess as participants in a prevenient natural order, to which they themselves are beholden and for which they are responsible, it will become the arena of a lesser known, yet no less terrible, tyranny: the Huxleyan tyranny of our own desires.

"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic” (Del Noce). Yet freedom has not become more luminous in the absence of authority. On the contrary, it has been eclipsed together with authority by ever-more absolute forms of arbitrary power: totalitarianisms which aim precisely at authority. Authority is in the service of freedom; for it is the power to make things grow in accord with the given order to which the authority is first subject. It is best represented by a father who bears witness to that order, received from above, as he hands himself over to the mother and together with her brings a child into being.

What strange creatures we are! We live fully only as creatures indwelt by an infinite desire. Yet, from within this paradox arises the temptation to self-enclosure, an attempt that at once curtails our desire for God and drives us toward the pursuit of unrestrained power. The seduction of modern technology pulls us in both directions. On the one hand, it would pacify us with its comforts and amusements. On the other, it would liberate us from our creaturely limits. We could become something else (transgenderism), or simply replaced by something “infinitely” better (AI). In either case, we settle for simulacra of the “good life.” Against these seductions, stands the invitation to “a joyful simplicity of life” [JPII] that sees in the acceptance of our finitude the living hope of an eternal promise.