Latest Posts

December 03, 2024

The Long Financial Shadow of 2008

If you ask most people today what caused the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent “Great Recession,” my suspicion is that the answer would be something like “untrammeled and unregulated financial markets.” Continue Reading...
November 27, 2024

How Trade Saved the Pilgrims, and the U.S.

By now the Pilgrims’ disastrous experiment with collectivism in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is well-known, in free market circles if not among the young. The story has been printed and popularized – Rush Limbaugh even recites it annually on his radio program. Continue Reading...
November 26, 2024

Christianity Against Power-Worship

All modern politics is a clash of totalizing ideologies seeking absolute power. Or at least it seems that way. Christians sometimes find themselves caught in the middle of these culture wars, stuck trying to find compromises between competing goods. Continue Reading...
November 21, 2024

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...
November 20, 2024

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...
November 19, 2024

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...
November 15, 2024

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...
November 13, 2024

Preserving Our Identity as Makers

Ted Gioia, in his superb Substack “The Honest Broker,” recently verified one of the most disturbing trends in technology today: the way the presence of AI-created art and images is destroying our access to human-made art and images. Continue Reading...