Latest Posts

January 22, 2025

Peggy Noonan’s Revolution

I was a day shy of my eighth birthday when the reassuring words of President Reagan crackled over my family’s radio. Like all Americans, we were traumatized by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which carried, among her passengers, 38-year-old social studies teacher Christy McAuliffe. Continue Reading...
January 21, 2025

The Soul of David Lynch

On January 16, we lost David Lynch, at age 78, just shy of his January 20 birthday. That would be January 20, 1946. Lynch was a Baby Boomer. A child of ’50s America. Continue Reading...
January 15, 2025

Trump II, a New Majority, and the End of Identity Politics

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was undoubtably a referendum on the current political trajectory of the United States. He won both the popular vote, the first Republican since 2004 to do so, and a significant Electoral College majority, securing the largest electoral margin for a Republican since George H.W. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2025

Thinking Critically about Critical Theory

Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.” Continue Reading...
January 09, 2025

The Historian as Priestly Gardener

Contemporary Western culture is profoundly ahistorical, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker reasons in her latest book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. The Australian professor devotes the first quarter of the book to making the case that, around 2010, the occidental world entered this “phase of late modernity,” to which she assigns the moniker “the Ahistoric Age.” Continue Reading...
January 08, 2025

Jordan Peterson’s Bible Study

If there’s one thing Jordan B. Peterson has proved in his almost-decade run as an internationally known public intellectual, it’s that he can fight. Since his 2016 criticism of a Canadian law for effectively compelling speech related to the use of certain gender pronouns, the professional psychologist and academic has taken on a host of rhetorical sparring partners on Canadian, British, and Australian television; he’s also argued with prominent politicians, scientists, academics, and bloggers. Continue Reading...
January 07, 2025

The Liberty-Virtue Dance

Conservative politics in 2025 faces a defining moment. The long-standing fusion of moral traditionalism and political libertarianism has lost its once dominant influence, with the risk of becoming irrelevant. Under Vice President-elect J.D. Continue Reading...