“But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.” —Heraclitus, Fragment Whenever an act of violence is committed against Muslims by a non-Muslim, as Brenton Tarrant did in March when he viciously gunned down 50 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand, the left-liberal...
Among democratic peoples, . . . the thread of time is broken at every moment, and the trace of the generations fades. You easily forget those who preceded you, and you have no idea about those who will follow you. Only those closest to you are of interest. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America During...
Toxic is the combination of equality and evolution, of Rousseau and Darwin. Blended together and served upon the paps of public schools, television, and social media, they are the essential ingredients of the gall-milk of the postmodern world. They ensure that every infant will grow into a fully mature Ignoble Savage. Rousseau gave the West...
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images . . . —T.S. Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead,” The Waste Land The body of the hapless American missionary John Chau has...
Hardly anyone thought much about the mysterious inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, whom we call the Sentinelese (because we have no idea what else to call them), until the close of November in the Year of Our Lord 2018. But following a report of the untimely and violent death of 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau...
Aquaculture—farming water for food as opposed to fishing it—is as old as civilization. The Romans did it; so did Mrs. Martin Luther. But catfish farming is an American industry, something of a native-born wonder. As I mentioned previously, catfish farms revitalized a vast area of the Deep South and provided Americans coast to coast with...
Summer is the time for lazy fishing in the hot sun. That calls for a fish story. And what follows is no tall tale, although I think the moral of the story is quite significant. For I am now willing to say, without exaggeration, that catfish perfectly symbolize our great national problem. When I was...
Did Pope Francis deny the existence of Hell? If previous episodes in this pontificate are any guide, those who earnestly seek a definitive answer will likely discover that, much like the natural fate of the Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. But before the rest of us have a catharsis of confirmation bias, let’s...
Looking objectively at the legacy of Billy Graham in the wake of his passing is virtually impossible, especially for me personally. I know several people who answered the altar call at a Graham crusade, “just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me,” and mark that occasion as their...
Professional Democrats, like the proverbial dog who returns to his vomit, cannot quit the idea that their grotesque caricatures of those who hold traditional views of marriage and family, men and women, borders and citizenship, and meaningful employment will appeal to enough of the electorate to return control of the government to them. Donald Trump...
Whether or not America is or ever was a Christian nation is hotly debated. It is fashionable today on the left to ascribe whatever currently is deemed by it to be unacceptable—“trans phobia,” say—to the legacy of privileged patriarchal white men whose Christianity gave them an excuse to own slaves and otherwise oppress minorities. The...
Hollywood loves Christmas, or Winterfest, or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is because many Americans make it the most wonderful time of the year for the studios, offering them gifts of gold. For example, on December 25, 2015, we gave Buena Vista/Disney $49.3 million for the right to spend 2 hours and 16...
Back in the good old days, we could afford to argue among ourselves about justification by faith alone, indulgences, and the intercession of the Virgin Mary. But now, with abortion, gay marriage, and illegitimacy exalted in popular culture and protected by law, and with religious freedom under assault, we should set aside our differences so...
Charlottesville was a shameful disaster, and the responses from America’s elites were far from encouraging. Most of them amounted to “Who started it?” That is the response of a child. But then again, “Antifa came better-armed and was more violent overall” is as morally asinine a statement as “Why didn’t Trump clearly denounce the KKK?” ...
This September marks 16 years since the fateful day we simply call 9/11, when 19 Islamic jihadists caused the deaths of some 3,000 people in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Less than a month after that horrible day, Operation Enduring Freedom began, as the United States invaded the “land of the Pashtuns,” Afghanistan. We’re still...
“In Europe and America There’s a growing feeling of hysteria.” —Sting, “Russians” (1985) Are the Russians guilty of trying to undermine American democracy? The answer may surprise you. But first the “news.” As I write, Business Insider is neatly summarizing the current state of mainstream reportage and opinion: “Evidence is mounting that Russia took 4...
Mitch Landrieu and his growing coalition of disgruntled minorities and public-school-educated leftists give us an idea of where a divided, majority-ruled America is heading. In May, the mainstream media sacrificed valuable airtime and column space normally devoted to unsourced White House leaks to laud the New Orleans mayor’s effort to remove four monuments to the...
Randy teenage boys and hyphenated man-loathing feminists can agree on one thing: Prom is no place for patriarchal body-shaming. In this context, by body we must read cleavage, midriffs, thighs, and intergluteal clefts; and by shaming, we are to understand that the aforementioned have been unjustly deemed unfit for public viewing. To establish rules prohibiting...
And it came to pass that fear did grip all of the Swamp, from Foggy Bottom to DuPont Circle; and it did spread unto all of the region beyond the Potomac. For behold, Steve Bannon had come. Or, if we prefer not to use the familiar “Steve,” Stephen K. Bannon. The K must not be...
The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and the proliferation of ignorance. Cut this monstrous budget in half, and federal spending on education is still not...
Are addictions real? We talk as if they are. Many women say they are addicted to chocolate. Actor David Duchovny has been diagnosed with having a sex addiction. In the early 90’s, when crack was all the rage, one Christian pop singer encouraged young people to get off drugs and get “Addicted to Jesus.” What...
Angela Merkel isn’t as nutty as she sounds, or so she would have you to believe. She simply wants to have her Obst kuchen (“fruitcake”) and eat it too. The Obst kuchen, in this case, is liberalism, whereby people from every tribe under heaven—including the Islamic ones—live happily together in the Motherland, and all ethnic,...
The world will little remember what Barack Obama said during his disappointing presidency, despite his messianic promise and his reputation as rhetor par excellence. His words were not memorable to begin with. (Try to recall a quotation, apart from his famous campaign slogan.) More significantly, his words were not intended to be remembered. They served...
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
The timing of Omar Mateen’s shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub was rotten for the Obama administration, because Secretary of State John Kerry had just published his carefully worded Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), in which the word religion or religious appears nine times, but Islam, Islamist, and Muslim appear nary a-once. The administration’s...
“Hillsboro’s a conservative community,” said Robert, and for three days and three nights I attempted to figure out what he meant. He said it right after we arrived at his shop, high atop a lush, sylvan hill off Beaver Creek Road, five miles south of Hillsboro in Western Wisconsin, the “Driftless Area.” It’s called “driftless”...
My great-grandparents loved music. When I look through old sepia-toned pictures from hog-killing day—here’s one of my great-uncles dangling a fat pig into a 55-gallon caldron of boiling water—I always see a guitar or two in the background. The natural rhythms of life, of the year, were marked by celebrations. There were luxury items to...
We’ve lost, I regret to inform you, yet another civilization-shattering battle. I mean the one over your daughter’s right to use a public restroom without worrying whether there is a dude doing his business in the stall next to her. This would be the same as the battle over your wife’s right to undress and...
“[T]o speak in general terms of the prototypical Southern conservative we would say first of all that he was not an alienated man.” —M.E. Bradford, “Where We Were Born and Raised” White nationalism has long existed on the borderlands of disaffected conservatism. Among its several denominations is the movement known as identitarianism, which combines the...
The leftist regime, incarnate in bold and belligerent Democrats and tepid, me-too Republicans, hates women, the same way it hates black people. The way you can tell is that you often hear them screaming (or sobbing) exactly the opposite, as justification for the passage of unprecedented social-engineering laws. Yet judging by the effects of both...
When Glenn Beck took the podium at his Restoring Honor rally, he began by listing off the names of American heroes and identifying their motivation to fight for their country: “You cannot coexist with evil.” If evil has reared its ugly head, an honorable man, like Washington and Lincoln, must stand and fight. It’s a...
America is special. America has a mission. America is a beacon of liberty. America, God shed His grace on thee. We call it American exceptionalism—the belief that, from among the countries of the world, the United States of America has been uniquely called by God to be X. In this equation, X equals whatever you...
Pastors are sinners in need of redemption, like everyone else. A pastor must forgive and be forgiven, and this is something that the flock must be taught and must embrace, or subtle Donatism will creep in with the latest gossip. Nonetheless, beginning with the Pastoral Epistles of Saint Paul, Christians have also been taught that,...
What is a school? Today, we think of school as an institution or even as a building. But school comes from the Greek skhole, “leisure”—i.e., clear your schedule of mundane tasks and make time to contemplate what matters. It only makes sense, then, that parents who send their children to school, and the teachers who...
Can you imagine the FDA approving a drug that, say, increased the risk of blood clots, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks, breast cancer, and migraines for women? And fathom, if you will, the absurd notion that such a drug could be approved for the treatment of something that isn’t even a disease, a genetic abnormality, or...
As I write, April 15 is still fresh in the mind, and the sting of death remains, combining the current pangs of tax extraction with the promise of a greater burden to come, thanks to the Barackification of heathcare. So imagine my delight when I read in a back issue of a leading Christian magazine...
The empire was beset by foreign invaders and war in the Middle East. Far-flung wars meant more taxes for the provinces and an increase in poverty. Some men had to choose between feeding their families and paying for medical care. Some couldn’t afford either. In the large urban centers, the poor were getting poorer, while...
So, thanks again for the love in the cradle and all of the changes that kept me dry. And thanks again for the love at our table and tannin’ my bottom when I told you a lie . . . It’s a tear-jerker of a song, and the only thing that rescues Ricky Skaggs’ “Thanks...
The amoeba. You remember it from biology class; it’s your long-lost relative. Don’t believe it? Well, you’re probably one of those pro-life Christian homeschooling losers. You don’t play nice with others. You are socially maladjusted. “Amoeba are essentially everywhere and have probably existed . . . long before the appearance of macroscopic animals,” says the...
“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes. “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.” The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter. Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of...
C.S. Lewis wrote about the “death of words.” In essence, he suggested that, whenever we feel compelled to append a noun with the adjectives true or real, it is safe to say that the noun has lost its meaning, or died. “No, no, we’re true conservatives.” There’s my example. So what do you do, then? ...
When Miss California’s assets were revealed to be fakies, I immediately thought of a line from Roland Bainton’s excellent and concise history The Medieval Church: “The real point,” he wrote, “was . . . ” Well, first, the story. Way back on April 19, during the Miss USA pageant, California’s Carrie Prejean was flying high. ...
It’s Lent, so naturally I’m thinking about Barack Obama. Well, specifically, about his inauguration. You remember, don’t you—the day that hope became sight? I don’t want to be overdramatic, but it now seems obvious to me that President Obama’s inauguration explains just about everything that’s wrong with Christian churches in America. And really, this has...
Twelve long months ago, America was in the throes of Holiday Shopping Season ’07. It was a simpler time. The Dow was safely over 10,000, and we were all wondering whether it would be Hillary or Giuliani in the White House come January ’09. I push my cart carrying 250 pounds of chicken feed up...
This is an age in which news of a tragedy garners a response such as this: “Well, our thoughts are with you.” Happy thoughts full of Pelagian grace. It is therefore with some reservation that I now examine Rocky Twyman’s direct and public prayer to the Almighty, a supplication he no doubt offers with full...
My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot and hunt, taught me how to change the oil, taught me how to drive a truck, taught me how to...
Americans are a people of deeply held religious conviction. If any has doubts, let him look on the most serious of our sacred holidays and believe. Naturally, it is a federal holiday, but that fact alone does not convey the magnitude of this special day. For, unlike other federal holidays, this one carries with it...
Harold O.J. Brown fell asleep, as Our Lord puts it, on July 8, just two days after his 74th birthday. This magazine’s religion editor since 1989, he was a contributor before that. The title of this column was inspired by his most significant book, among several significant books, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the...
“Lord, he looks so peaceful,” Miss Alice said tearfully. I braced myself for a long two hours at my post—and that was before the funeral started. Interrupting my thoughts, she looked up at me and spoke in a whisper that was loud enough for Pastor Brown, who was standing on the other side of the...
Here’s a heresy for you. A grave danger is lurking among us, caused by certain people who are spreading lies—and in the name of Christianity! So grave is this danger that it threatens our very way of life. And, as one of our great leaders once said, “The American way of life is not negotiable.”...