Latest Posts

March 21, 2023

C.S. Lewis on the Specter of Totalitarianism

It is safe to say C.S. Lewis is not known first of all for his treatment of totalitarianism. We are familiar with Lewis the Christian apologist, Lewis the writer of children’s stories and science fiction fantasy, Lewis the literary critic and Oxford don, and then chair of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge. Continue Reading...
March 16, 2023

The Myth of American Inequality

The notion of rising income inequality has permeated modern American discourse and is assumed as inherent to our economic system such that any claim to the contrary is easily dismissed as ignorance or insincerity. Continue Reading...
March 15, 2023

Conservative Compassion Fatigue

Part 3 of my series on poverty and the welfare state ended with a brief look at two community associations in South Dallas. As the Washington welfare-reform impasse in 1995 and 1996 dragged on, I traveled the country learning and speechifying. Continue Reading...
March 14, 2023

A Catholic College Guts Its Curriculum

Some years ago, only tangentially related to the reading we were doing in our seminar class, the students and I got into a conversation about jobs we found especially unappealing. I began with “guy who sprays de-icing chemicals on planes in the middle of winter from a cherry picker,” and the students quickly followed suit. Continue Reading...
March 10, 2023

Fear and the Feeble Foundations of Ideology

I recently read the monumental essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) by Soviet dissident Václav Havel and immediately began to draw parallels between how he describes socialist oppression and what I understand of diabolical oppression. Continue Reading...
March 09, 2023

Creating Christ: Challenging Christian Origins

As Creating Christ will have it, Christianity as we know it was more or less invented, or at least redirected, by two members of the Flavian dynasty, Emperor Vespasian and his son (and eventual emperor) Titus, as a way of enforcing docility on zealous Jewish sects who wanted pagan Rome out of Jerusalem and out of their lives. Continue Reading...
March 08, 2023

The Adam Smith We Need

There are two reasons to read Glory M. Liu’s new comprehensive book, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism. The first is that if you are a student of economics or history, there is a remarkable amount of well-documented information packaged into a logically sequential analysis that is well worth your time. Continue Reading...
March 07, 2023

Ad-Copy Gospel and the Christian Marketing Dilemma

With perhaps the exception of the recent Asbury revival, it’s rare to see Christianity referenced in popular culture in a positive way. Be it debates over Christian nationalism or the tragically unending list of church abuse scandals, Christianity’s portrayal within modern media often swings on a doom-and-gloom pendulum, between the cheery endpoints of authoritarianism and abuse. Continue Reading...