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In today’s Times of London, William Rees-Mogg writes about the Vatican and its apparent rejection of intelligent design. Rees-Mogg also makes this provocative claim about Pope Benedict and some possible surprises from this new pontificate: His critics had expected him to be more conservative than his predecessor. I tended to share this expectation myself, but refrained from expressing it because new leaders always surprise one; they move in directions no one had previously foreseen. We should have been more conscious...

Jesus loves… the welfare state?

Via Best of the Web Today, an ment from Senator John Kerry: Democratic Sen. John Kerry called the Republican budget approved by the U.S. Senate “immoral” and said it will hurt cities like Manchester. “As a Christian, as a Catholic, I think hard about those responsibilities that are moral and how you translate them into public life,” the Massachusetts senator said at a rally Saturday in support of Democratic Mayor Bob Baines, who is running for re-election. “There is not...

The moral legacy of Rosa Parks

Black Americans have enjoyed only a mixed record of progress in the fifty years since Rosa Parks took her seat on that Montgomery bus. Anthony Bradley examines her legacy and the nature of liberty in today’s America. “Truly free blacks are those who are free to make their own morally formed choices without government involvement,” Bradley writes. Read the mentary here. ...

Primitive genetic engineering

A long oral and written tradition about the mixing of species has been noted on this blog before, specifically with regard to Josephus. I just ran across this tidbit in Luther that I thought I would share, which points to a continuation of a tradition of this sort running down through the Reformation. Luther menting on the Old Testament character of Anah, and debating whether we might consider Anah to mitted incest. He writes: We could say that Anah also...

The ‘Royal Road of Liberty’

From Herman Bavinck: Even a freedom that cannot be obtained and enjoyed aside from the danger of licentiousness and caprice is still always to be preferred over a tyranny that suppresses liberty. In the creation of humanity, God himself chose this way of freedom, which carried with it the danger and actually the fact of sin as well, in preference to forced subjection. Even now, in ruling the world and governing the church, God still follows this royal road of...

“…and then carry the one…”

Whoops. This week, GM retracts its earnings report from four years ago, saying it overstated its profits by somewhere between $300-400 million dollars. The tendency with a story like this is to cry “fraud!” and then denounce corporate America for its inherently corrupt nature. Now, who can say what the cause is of this slip-up (blunder, goof, unbelievably huge mathematical oh-oh?)? But in the absence of the whole story, how proper is pessimism? Is it possible to be ambivalent toward...

Global warming and hurricanes

In the days preceding the arrival of Hurricane Wilma in Florida, Center for Academic Research Director Samuel Gregg joined host John Rabe on Fort Lauderdale radio station WAFG’s Vocal Point show to discuss what, if any, relationship exists between the increased frequency of hurricanes over the past few years and global warming. You can listen to the 20 minute interview below. (MP4) ...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

The Black Church: A World Within a World

What we mean when we use the word “Black” (and whether or not we capitalize it) causes constant confusion in American life. We are liable to contrast Black with white, and to treat the two terms as though they belong to the same category: race. But this is a mistake. As a matter of historical fact, Black Americans formed separate cultural institutions because they were excluded from white institutions or forced to be subordinate within them on account of...

Aug 1, 2026

Antigone: A Hero for Our Time

Sophocles’ Antigone is a Rorschach test. People see in it whatever they are thinking. To the self-professed and much munist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Antigone is a “bitch,” though she may also be an admirable figure in her zealous and determined striving against her government. Or perhaps, Žižek suggests alternately, she is a troublemaker creating havoc within an otherwise healthy, well-organized state. In recent versions of the play that he has published with differing endings, Žižek has put forward both...

Aug 1, 2026

Gertrude Himmelfarb: Historian of the Liberal Paradox

Intellectual historians can serve their societies as guides in wayward times. If they are willing to look at the past not as a primitive patchwork of error and sin, but as an arena of human action free of the present’s particular prejudices, they can learn to see in their own time and place what is invisible to their contemporaries. NEH chairman Jon Parrish Peede perhaps said it best: “The life and work of Gertrude Himmelfarb enriched … the humanities...

Aug 1, 2026

Heroes and Monsters: British Abolition and the Art of Compromise

It may be the most decisive plete victory in any moral argument in human history. European and North American elites had, for centuries, deliberately ignored the ethics of the Atlantic slave trade, or justified it as a regrettable necessity, or simply accepted it as a vast fact of life that could not be wished away. Suddenly, in the 1780s, a previously eccentric and extreme view—that the trade ought to be abolished—won a mass following in both Britain and the...

Aug 1, 2026

Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers

Gerald Bray enjoys a rich résumé: research professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama, where he taught from 1993 to 2006; ordained minister of the Church of England; director of research for the Latimer Trust. He has published on the patristic period and wider matters of church history, systematic theology, and Anglicanism. In How the Church Fathers Read the Bible, Bray does the church further service by providing an imaginative and insightful overview of the approach of...

Aug 1, 2026

The Neo-Latinate Imagination of Joseph Bottum

Joseph Bottum has long been known for his elegant prose style, omnivorous literary allusiveness, and cultural critic’s eye for what we know, what we think we know, and the sometimes embarrassing gap between those things. His decades of editorial work for The Weekly Standard and First Things guided both those organs through their great ages of growth from political and religious magazines to eclectic and spirited journals of cultural review. Less known is that Bottum’s first book was a...

Aug 1, 2026

National Conservatism One Year Later

On the afternoon of November 3, 2021, I sat alone at a table in the Orlando Airport TGI Fridays, exhausted. Equally travel-weary families (or at least parents), whose children still bustled with energy, surrounded me. I was grateful for getting through TSA security with plenty of time for a meal before my flight, and grateful to be—for the first time in three days—alone with my thoughts. When my salad arrived, I pushed aside my notes from NatCon 2, the...

Aug 1, 2026

Christian Pluralism as a Way of Loving

The evangelical Anglican theologian Michael F. Bird provides a clear-eyed and charitable vision of the current state of religious liberty in the Western world. Working from Australia, but with a keen eye on developments elsewhere and particularly in America, Bird’s offering provides both a framework for evaluating the contemporary situation as well as a call for Christians to promote the need for religious liberty more responsibly. Bird’s book is a helpful point of departure for engaging the challenges and...

Aug 1, 2026

Once One People of One Book

Mark A. Noll, professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame, is among the most prolific and plished historians of American religion ever. I once imagined that the 2002 book America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln was Noll’s magnum opus. With the recent appearance of America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, I am no longer sure whether to view America’s God as a standalone volume or as a sort panion...

Aug 1, 2026

The Flawed Greatness of Thomas Jefferson

It is always hard to know where to begin with Thomas Jefferson—or where to end. In that respect, he is not that different from a great many other talented political figures in our history. The politician’s art all but requires a talent for enigma, an ability to draw in disparate followers and factions while remaining mysterious, un-pin-down-able, containing worlds of seeming contradiction within both public image and private life. Think of the tangled plexity of men like Woodrow Wilson,...

Aug 1, 2026