Treating Family like Royalty

Many years ago, an acquaintance of my wife’s and mine married a Habsburg. She was not of noble stock—just a good ol’ American girl whose beauty piqued the interest of a European archduke during a visit to the states. Continue Reading...

The Life and Death of Alexei Navalny

On February 16, 2024, Alexei Navalny died under mysterious circumstances in the remote Siberian penal colony to which he was moved in late 2023. Founder and leader of the Anti- Corruption Foundation, Navalny was a long-time dissident and one of the most vocal critics of Putin’s regime over the past two decades, so his suspicious death was no surprise to anyone remotely acquainted with contemporary Russian politics. Continue Reading...

A Gentleman in Moscow Is More than Mere Entertainment

When Vladimir Lenin seized control of Russia in 1917, his Bolshevik government ended centuries of autocratic rule, replacing it with an all-consuming tyranny of its own. Within half a century, over 18 million Russians would pass through forced-labor camps and more than 25 million would be dead. Continue Reading...

What Is Liberalism?

“When the enemy is Hitler,” F.H. Buckley writes, “and the world is divided between Schmittian friends and enemies, everything is permitted.” Such divisive contemporary issues as Black Lives Matter, the Israel-Palestine war, and trans rights leave little room for compromise and much for demonization. Continue Reading...

The Hidden Ideology of Megachurch Marketing

As an unofficial member of “Weird Christian Twitter,” I had kept up fairly well with the onslaught of pastoral sex scandals this past summer. It was only a peek into an otherwise quite active stream of controversy over how abuse cases had been handled (or just ignored) by prominent evangelical leaders, from the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and from John MacArthur to Doug Wilson. Continue Reading...

How the West Moved Beyond Racism and Tribalism

John M. Ellis’ A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism is an important book. It defends the values and history of Western civilization underlying the political and economic systems that have produced the prosperous and multifaceted world Westerners currently enjoy. Continue Reading...