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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
When contemporary transhumanists like Yuval Noah Harari speak about future migrations and amalgamations of human consciousness, they generally preface their ideas with outright dismissals of religion and the truths it may offer. Continue Reading...
In nearly every era prior to our own, the links between sex, marriage, and children were considered a given, not a state of affairs to be questioned, let alone altered. Not so today, as the widespread availability of contraception and related changes in mores have enabled men and women to engage in sex without commitment—and, in many cases, to pursue both sex and marriage without any necessary connection to parenthood. Continue Reading...
The name of the Acton Institute’s magazine, Religion and Liberty, seems to many people an oxymoron. The word “religion” apparently emerged from religare, “to bind together, to constrain.” How can something that binds be liberating? Continue Reading...