One of the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers has a new book out in which he shares how he has spent his career trying to recapture the exuberance, excitement, and exhilarating freedom of a special period in film history. Read More… Hollywood has largely run out of artists and doesn’t seem able or perhaps even interested in producing movies that can hold a candle to the great achievements of its 100-year history. America still dominates cinema, but it has debased...

The “He Gets Us” ad campaign that drew so much attention during the Super Bowl is sleek Christianity for a secular audience, but what does “success” really look like? Read More… With perhaps the exception of the recent Asbury revival, it’s rare to see Christianity referenced in popular culture in a positive way. Be it debates over Christian nationalism or the tragically unending list of church abuse scandals, Christianity’s portrayal within modern media often swings on a doom-and-gloom pendulum, between...

The 1990s saw several Republican-initiated welfare-reform proposals gain little traction. But some progress was being made on the local level, where most people still saw hope for real, personal change. Read More… Part 3 of my series on poverty and the welfare state ended with a brief look at munity associations in South Dallas. As the Washington welfare-reform impasse in 1995 and 1996 dragged on, I traveled the country learning and speechifying. I learned much from Deborah Darden and her...

Scholars’ tendency to read the great economist through the lens of their own philosophical and mitments is neither unexpected nor helpful. One book helps us identify some of those biases and also something closer to Smith’s true legacy. Read More… There are two reasons to read Glory M. Liu’s prehensive book,Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism. The first is that if you are a student of economics or history, there is a remarkable...

Whether in the spiritual or the political realm, lies, fear, and a lust for power threaten human dignity and flourishing. But the light of truth shines in the darkness still. Read More… I recently read the monumental essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) by Soviet dissident Václav Havel and immediately began to draw parallels between how he describes socialist oppression and what I understand of diabolical oppression. As a veteran Marine Corps infantry officer and 20-year catechist in the...

A new book challenges false narratives and skewed statistics that make the e prospects of Americans appear worse than they are. We must get our facts straight before we can implement better policies and eliminate a key obstacle to real progress: government-sanctioned disincentives to work. Read More… The notion of rising e inequality has permeated modern American discourse and is assumed as inherent to our economic system such that any claim to the contrary is easily dismissed as ignorance or...

When students at a small Christian college in Kentucky got caught up in prayer and refused to leave an otherwise routine chapel service, the world took notice. What it meant all depends on what—or Who you think was responsible. Read More… Sometimes God works and speaks to people in mysterious ways. At other times, He is as blunt and obvious as a slap in the face. The recent Asbury revival in Wilmore, Kentucky, qualifies as an example of the latter....

A new documentary, 30 years in the making, argues for a Roman provenance for the Christian religion. Does it convince? Read More… As Creating Christ will have it, Christianity as we know it was more or less invented, or at least redirected, by two members of the Flavian dynasty, Emperor Vespasian and his son (and eventual emperor) Titus, as a way of enforcing docility on zealous Jewish sects who wanted pagan Rome out of Jerusalem and out of their lives....

Marymount is not alone in this. Colleges across the country are making hard decisions about what to keep and what to drop to stay afloat. But providing an education grounded in the search for truth, one that inspires the heart as well as the mind and that holds out hope of something more than a paycheck, should be part of that process. Read More… Some years ago, only tangentially related to the reading we were doing in our seminar class,...

The great Christian apologist’s “scientocracy” is upon us. What should be our response? Read More… It is safe to say C.S. Lewis is not known first of all for his treatment of totalitarianism. We are familiar with Lewis the Christian apologist, Lewis the writer of children’s stories and science fiction fantasy, Lewis the literary critic and Oxford don, and then chair of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge. We’re less familiar with Lewis the political thinker. But in the almost...