Public Life, Private Vice in American Life

February 16, 2024 • by James Diddams

Public Life, Private Vice in American Life

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February 15, 2024

The Michaela Way and Living in Community

Educators love innovation. Education reform is a perennial theme in political campaigns, and almost every government has new rhetoric about how to reverse plummeting test scores, declining student achievement, and increased school violence and truancy. Continue Reading...
February 14, 2024

Friendship, Markets, and Reciprocal Gifts

In his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI highlighted the inadequacy of a social imaginary that includes only the market and the state: The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society. Continue Reading...
February 13, 2024

Genesis 1 vs. the Populist Threat

Political polarization is the watchword in this cultural moment. Family members and friends are estranged over everything from Trump to transgenderism. We seem strangely obsessed with the news and even rally our children as public mascots for our various causes. Continue Reading...
February 09, 2024

Can This Man—and the Black Church—Save America?

America is facing the political rerun from hell: a seemingly inevitable rematch between two of the most divisive presidential candidates in recent memory. We’re once again headed for the partisan trenches in this most beloved of quadrennial fiascos: the battle to see which very senior citizen will have access to nuclear codes (and the presidential X account) for the next four years. Continue Reading...
February 07, 2024

Mary’s Son, the Genius

It’s wrong to reduce Jesus to a moral teacher or mere philosopher. Jesus was not a wordsmith selling word salads, nor a crank peddling new ideas, nor a sophist showing off his rhetorical verve, nor an intellectual establishing his own academy à la Plato. Continue Reading...
February 06, 2024

The Abolition of America

Christopher Rufo is the American right’s man on fire. Perhaps no person has done more than Rufo to expose the true aim of identity politics and its enforcement arm, the diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) project: the abolition of American life. Continue Reading...
February 02, 2024

Threats to Religious Liberty in the U.K.

There is a real possibility that the next general election in the United Kingdom will take place within a few weeks of the presidential election in the United States. It is fair to say that no one knows what will happen on either side of the Atlantic. Continue Reading...
February 01, 2024

John M. Perkins and the Gift of Drawing Closer

Last month I wrote about John M. Perkins, who is black, and wealthy philanthropist Howard Ahmanson, who is white. Forty years ago, together in a hotel near the Mumbai, India, airport, they wanted their driver, a Dalit (“untouchable”), to have a room. Continue Reading...