Latest Posts

March 28, 2023

Antonin Scalia’s Rise to Greatness

When Judge Antonin Scalia was confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States on September 16, 1986, no senator voted in opposition. He was confirmed by a vote of 98-to-0, a margin completely unthinkable 30 years later. Continue Reading...
March 24, 2023

John Wesley: The World Is My Parish

Our journey through the 18th-century evangelical revival continues in the company of John Wesley (1703­–1791). Wesley was an extraordinary individual. First, he was a systematic organizer, one key reason for his legacy in Methodism—as seen most prominently in his forming of bands (3–4 people) and classes (10–12 people) for Christian education. Continue Reading...
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...