Latest Posts

August 05, 2025

J.R.R. Tolkien: Writing as Discovery

I am a self-proclaimed Inklings appreciator. From C.S. Lewis’s critical essays to Charles Williams’s doctrinal horror novels to Owen Barfield’s strange and marvelous metaphysic of symbols, this little group of writers has my heart. Continue Reading...
July 31, 2025

The Myth-Busting, Poverty-Curing Power of Free Markets

In their new book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism, former Senator Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, George Mason University professor of economics, challenge seven widely held but false views of capitalism and markets, which fuel an overreliance on government. Continue Reading...
July 30, 2025

William F. Buckley Jr.: A Man for Our Season

Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of William F. Buckley Jr. is not just another book—it is an event. The National Review founder originally authorized Tanenhaus to write it in the 1990s, inspired by the strength of Tanenhaus’s biography of the anticommunist journalist Whittaker Chambers. Continue Reading...
July 29, 2025

Eddington Is COVID

Eddington is not supposed to be a horror movie. This might be a surprise to fans of the writer-director also responsible for the demented supernatural family drama Hereditary and the Wicker Man–esque neo-pagan nightmare Midsommar. Continue Reading...
July 25, 2025

Kuyper and Islam

Abraham Kuyper is remembered as a titan of Dutch politics, a preeminent Reformed political theologian, and someone many consider the ideological father of the Protestant strain of Christian democracy. In Kuyper’s vast output, comprising over 200 books and 20,000 articles, outstanding is his Om de Oude Wereldzee, “On the Old World-Sea,” an impressive travelogue of Kuyper’s tours of the civilizations along the Mediterranean, from Crimea to Spain. Continue Reading...
July 24, 2025

Tickling the Ivies: Can Higher Education Be Saved?

Every now and then you read a book so simple in concept and so interesting in outcome that you kick yourself for not having come up with the idea. Many people have a sense that higher education has jumped the rails in a variety of ways, but mostly that sense gets fed by anecdote and rumor and clickbait. Continue Reading...
July 22, 2025

Separation of Church and Secularism

If armed officers of the state didn’t come to your church gathering this past weekend, demanding that you break up your unofficial and unlicensed religious gathering, you can thank, in large part, America’s largest Protestant tradition: Baptists. Continue Reading...
July 17, 2025

Novak in Nigeria: A Reflection on The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

In the heart of Nigeria’s bustling markets and vibrant churches, a quiet but powerful yearning lives: the desire to build a better life through faith, freedom, and hard work. It’s a desire I have seen in the eyes of young students in Enugu, in the determination of women trading tomatoes on the streets of Aba, and in the quiet prayers of fathers hoping to send their children to school. Continue Reading...