Milton did not err in his depiction of the Devil in Paradise Lost, and modern times show it to be thus. Read More… I’ve been rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost. I am not alone in this; earlier this year, every time I checked Twitter, someone menting on Paradise Lost. There seemed to be a gravitational pull toward Milton’s epic. Many people, from Jaspreet Singh Boparai at The Critic to Ed Simon at LitHub, found menting on this very old poem—and not...

“Action is the life of virtue … and the world is the theatre of action.” Read More… Hannah More (1745–1833) was a most extraordinary woman. A poet and playwright mixing with the leading figures of her day in the theater and arts, she found evangelical faith and deployed her considerable writing skills in support of William Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade. These same talents were harnessed in advocacy of evangelical Christianity through a series of influential tracts and pamphlets....

Fifty years ago, Israel was stunned by a surprise attack, the beginning of what became known as the Yom Kippur War. A new film starring Oscar-winner Helen Mirren as Golda Meir details the arduous decision-making process of a prime minister responsible not only for the lives of young soldiers but the very survival of her country, even as she barely clung to life herself. Read More… On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas launched...

There have been many attempts to prove the existence of God and disprove a sui generis universe in which sentient life is a mere accident of the Big Bang. A new book offers some fresh insights into why theism is a better explanation than naturalism for understanding reality, including the ability to do science. Read More… “In fact, the fundamental claim of this book is that if one believes the world actually is intelligible—that things make sense, and ultimate explanation...

Lost in the Cosmos was derided when first published 40 years ago yet remains an irresistible test of the extent to which we remain mysteries even to ourselves. Read More… Forty years ago, the philosopher and novelist Walker Percy published what is easily the strangest book of his writing career. Lost in the Cosmos distills the major themes of both his novels and his philosophical essays into a little over 250 pages of multiple-choice questions (and peculiar answers), hypotheticals, and...

Does true individualism mean post-racialism? Read More… This three-part series on race and the right began with a look at some truly telling statistics about how badly American conservatives are doing at taking on racial issues. Politically, 85% of Republican voters are white—the most racially homogeneous the party’s been since 2016 and the rise of Donald Trump. When race is paired with religion, the numbers still tell an overwhelmingly one-sided story: white Protestants consistently dwarf every other racial and religious...

Harvard has a long history of taking race and religion into consideration when admitting students, unfortunately. Read More… The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA), which invalidated the use of race as a criterion for college admissions, dominated several summer news cycles and prompted no shortage of opinion pieces and responses. Little of mentary focused, however, on the long plicated history that the university at the...

A new book argues that some Big Players are working behind the scenes to make it increasingly impossible for us to own anything. Are things really that bad? And if so, do the offered solutions make sense? Read More… The tyrannical collusion between global and corporate elites and the U.S. government leaves us teetering on the edge of losing everything and owning nothing, according to Carol Roth in her new book, You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New...

The author of Evangelical Is Not Enough and Christ the Tiger had much to say on the subject of high culture and the “permanent things.” A new collection of his essays keeps his ideas alive at a time when everything seems terribly disposable. Read More… True art is a hard sell in an era in which media is predominant. Today, successful media is immediate, snappy, flashy, pervasive, and geared toward influencing the public to buy something and/or think a certain...

History demonstrates that ethnic and racial fractionalization always ends in societal collapse. Crafting a new melting pot can save this country and the West. But it won’t be easy. Read More… Up until a few decades ago, it mon to think of the United States as a melting pot. People from all over the world e to this great country, adopt American values, and learn English while also bringing a piece of their former culture to mix into the broader...