Put Down the Phone and Pick up the Psalms

Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age makes a compelling argument. Its author, Samuel James, asks readers to consider how long it’s been since they’ve checked a phone for notifications, or whether they’re in the habit of checking email while talking with people in person—or checking texts while driving. Continue Reading...

Reforming the Sword of Justice

In Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, Matt Martens has written an indispensable guide for Christians engaging with questions of criminal justice reform. While Dagan and Teles’ Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration had outlined the hopeful story of bipartisan, and even conservative, criminal justice reform in 2016, the events surrounding George Floyd’s death—including the recent uptick in the murder rate—has plunged the reform conversation back into the pit of political polarization. Continue Reading...

Is the New Right Just the Old Left?

In his introduction essay to Up from Conservatism, a collection of essays by “New Right” authors, editor Arthur Milikh remarks that “the goal of this volume is to correct the trajectory of the Right after several generations of political losses, moral delusions, and intellectual errors. Continue Reading...

The Real Threat to Economic Freedom

The tyrannical collusion between global and corporate elites and the U.S. government leaves us teetering on the edge of losing everything and owning nothing, according to Carol Roth in her new book, You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back. Continue Reading...

The Satanic Virtues

I’ve been rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost. I am not alone in this; earlier this year, every time I checked Twitter, someone was commenting on Paradise Lost. There seemed to be a gravitational pull toward Milton’s epic. Continue Reading...

God vs. Absurdity

“In fact, the fundamental claim of this book is that if one believes the world actually is intelligible—that things make sense, and ultimate explanation can be had—then God exists.” This is the provocative thesis of philosopher and writer Pat Flynn, whose new book, The Best Argument for God, insists that the real philosophical dilemma we face is not between theism and atheism but between theism and absurdity, or a reality that is utterly unintelligible. Continue Reading...

Walker Percy’s Guide to These Deranged Times

Forty years ago, the philosopher and novelist Walker Percy published what is easily the strangest book of his writing career. Lost in the Cosmos distills the major themes of both his novels and his philosophical essays into a little over 250 pages of multiple-choice questions (and peculiar answers), hypotheticals, and brief stories. Continue Reading...

Recovering the Melting Pot

Up until a few decades ago, it was common to think of the United States as a melting pot. People from all over the world would come to this great country, adopt American values, and learn English while also bringing a piece of their former culture to mix into the broader American culture. Continue Reading...

Discriminating Harvard

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA), which invalidated the use of race as a criterion for college admissions, dominated several summer news cycles and prompted no shortage of opinion pieces and responses. Continue Reading...

Overlooking Rural America

With magnifying glass in hand, a budding naturalist can learn a great deal about ants scuttling around the driveway. Were the ants to glance upward, however, they might learn even more about the eager eyes—blown up from the ant’s perspective to enormous proportions—looking down at them. Continue Reading...