Moral accountability is absolutely vital for individuals and societies. For an individual or society to flourish, it must have the integrity and humility examine itself morally. War is no exception. In a democratic republic such as ours, not only our military and political leaders but also the general public must participate actively and intelligently in [ Read More ]
An article in The Spectator recently described Jordan Peterson as “one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years”—and they have a point. Peterson went from being virtually unknown in 2012 to perhaps the most famous public intellectual in the world in 2018. He has more than 2 million followers on YouTube and [ Read More ]
Karl Marx’s thought has proven itself an unmitigated disaster in its historical instantiations. The primary reason is that Marxism offers itself as an alternative to God’s revelation and salvation in Christ. It offers an immanent salvation via social action and stands ready to persecute those who stand in its way. Untethered as it is from [ Read More ]
Smartphones are making us unbelievably, mind-numbingly, aggressively dumb. Not merely dumb. Also lonely, depressive, narcissistic, compulsive, and cynical. But for the purposes of this brief article, dumb. Smartphones are making us into lumpen half-wits. I suspected it for years, as I realized that my smartphone distracted me continually, feeding the more superficial aspects of my [ Read More ]
I am convinced that the single greatest cause of our time is the God-given call to uphold human dignity. Confessing that God created humanity in his image and redeemed us by the blood of his Son, any Christian ethic or politic worthy of the name must contend for the dignity of each person created in [ Read More ]
One of the most intriguing writers I’ve encountered recently is French political philosopher Pierre Manent. I’ve just now finished Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge (2015) and thought it worth while to trace the main contours of the book. I’ll summarize briefly, with minimal interaction. Manent’s [ Read More ]
During winter of this year, I began a research project on idolatrous political movements, reading and re-reading texts such as Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, Mircea Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy, and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. These books focused on the evils of Communist socialism [ Read More ]
Over the past few years, I’ve been invited to participate in ethics roundtables or seminars sponsored by United States military branches and intelligence agencies. In those seminars, we’ve discussed various topics, such as principles for deciding whether or not to go to war, principles for waging a just war, and principles for facilitating a warrior [ Read More ]
Political ideologies are a lot like individuals in that they tend to ascribe ultimacy to some aspect of God’s creation, rather than ascribing ultimacy to God himself. Once they have ascribed ultimacy to their chosen idol, they look to it to “save” their society by eradicating “evils” that threaten their idol. And “We the People” [ Read More ]
The Bible does not articulate a normative Christian political program or a detailed set of policy preferences. Yet, it provides a set of basic beliefs, arising from its narrative of the world, from which we can critique political ideologies and public policies. And critique we must. Thus, as I was re-reading J. Budziszewski’s The Revenge [ Read More ]