At the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, I recently attended the premiere of a new documentary, co-produced by Substack and FIRE, that attempts to explain the mental health crisis facing college students in America. Continue Reading...
Latest Posts
April 10, 2024
Beyoncé and the Neglected Downtrodden
Given that contemporary pop music is stagnant, Beyoncé’s country-inspired album Cowboy Carter was bound to be something of a sensation. Its chief significance is not aesthetic—the recordings are simultaneously too slick and underdeveloped. Continue Reading...
April 09, 2024
Man and Machine in World War II
Tom Hanks was the moral conscience of America in the ’90s, so far as Hollywood was concerned, and audiences largely concurred, because he’s like a new Jimmy Stewart: he exudes moral integrity and childlike innocence. Continue Reading...
April 03, 2024
Winston Churchill: His Histories and History
My library, a relatively small one by university standards, has over 150 books dealing with Winston Churchill, one of the Big Four of World War II, which included FDR, Stalin, and Hitler. Continue Reading...
April 02, 2024
Sigmund Freud, C.S. Lewis, and a Great Madness
Ambiguity is, in a neat mental onomatopoeia, a difficult word to define. But to begin to understand a piece of art like the film Freud’s Last Session, define it we must, and religious artists would do well to try to understand the film. Continue Reading...
April 01, 2024
Get Back to Work if You Know What’s Good for You
David L. Bahnsen’s new book, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, proposes a counterintuitive, if not contrarian, thesis. An extremely successful businessman (his firm, The Bahnsen Group, manages over $5 billion in assets) and a bona fide nerd who loves to write about faith, politics, and economics, Bahnsen argues that we’re not overworked—we’re underworked. Continue Reading...
March 28, 2024
John Williamson Nevin and the Revival of the Evangelical Mind
While the long 19th century gave birth to a variety of intellectual movements, it also saw its fair share of anti-intellectualism. The fallout from the Second Great Awakening was one such example; this era of American religious life witnessed the rise of pietism and biblicism, both of which called into question the value of both classical theological education and church history as a guide to biblical interpretation. Continue Reading...
March 27, 2024
The New Culture Warriors
How can principled conservatives reunite a fractured coalition? The ties that once bound the various parties on the right have frayed and, in some cases, snapped. The authors of Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture Wars answer this question and offer a set of approaches and values they claim can form a winning coalition. Continue Reading...
March 26, 2024
When All Is Cultural, Nothing Is Natural
Thinkers from nearly every intellectual tradition agree that we live in an age when ideology dominates public life. Who or what we can accurately label as ideological is as essentially contested as the rest of politics. Continue Reading...
March 22, 2024
Can We Agree to Disagree Agreeably?
For the past two and a half years, Republicans have used the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” as shorthand for a profane phrase that begins with an “F” and ends with the president’s name. Continue Reading...
