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Global Warming Consensus Alert: Coal is Universal!

When you think about it, NBC’s little promotional stunt on Sunday Night Football for their “Green is Universal” week is a lot like a mini-Kyoto treaty: it was an empty gesture that had no long-term impact on the problem it was trying to address, while immediately making things worse on their broadcast, and in the end the only thing it plished was to make the participants feel a bit better about themselves. They probably shouldn’t though, considering that in order...

Film Screening: ‘The Kite Runner’

GodblogCon 2007 hasn’t quite started yet, but one of the privileges of attendance at this year’s conference was an opportunity to see an early screening of “The Kite Runner,” (courtesy Grace Hill Media) directed by Marc Forster (who has also directed “Stranger than Fiction” and “Finding Neverland”). The film is based on the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini. Michael Medved helped to host the event late last night, introducing the film and as a special treat leading a Q&A session...

A Surge of Freedom: 18 Years Ago Today

Today marks the 18th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall served as a powerful contrast between free people and ideas, against a system of government that imprisoned its citizens through totalitarian control and intimidation. It also serves as a reminder of the nations and leaders who stood up to Soviet aggression bent on world domination. A grave situation for Berlin developed in 1948, when the Soviet Union cut off all land and rail access to...

GodblogCon 2007 Day 1

Today was a pretty full day that just wrapped up a few minutes ago. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, opened up the day with a keynote address, “Pioneering the New Media for Christ.” Mohler emphasized municative mandate of the Christian faith: “To be a Christian is to bear the responsibility municate.” Setting this statement within the context of stewardship, Mohler emphasized the biblical foundations for a Christian view munication. In creation God made...

The Greatness of America

Here is a fantastic quote about America that deserves a hearing: From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person. America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who–with their hands, their intelligence and...

GodblogCon Radio Roundtable

On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday, he hosted a roundtable discussion with folks at this year’s GodblogCon (link here). After Hugh interviews Mark Steyn, Hugh has Michael Medved, Al Mohler, John Mark Reynolds, and Mark D. Roberts to discuss the conference and the significance of new media for Christian cultural engagement. ...

Harry Reid, Fiscal Conservative

Sophisticated followers of politics such as the readers of PowerBlog will not be surprised by this story, but I’ll bring it to your attention anyway. The US House recently passed a bill that includes a dramatic tax increase on mining businesses. Supporters argue that the tax helps reign in the environmentally abusive mining industry. Higher taxes. Environmental concern. Senate Democrats would be scrambling to get on that bus, right? One problem: Majority Leader Harry Reid is from Nevada, whose economy...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Forgive Us Our Debts

Debt can be a cruel master, but it can also be a powerful servant. Debt is a tool. And like any tool, debt can be dangerous to those who misuse it and a snare to those who rely on it too much. It can also harm others if used badly. As Christians, we should not fear or shun using debt anymore than we should fear or shun weapons or fire or technology or power. In our debt-ridden age, paying...

Aug 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 2026

Lutherans Under Communism

Lutherans have been in Russia since the time of the Reformation. Ivan the Terrible, wanting to bring Russia into the 16th century, invited German craftsmen and tradesmen to settle in the country. He allowed the first Lutheran church to be built just outside Moscow in 1576. Four years later, he ordered it to be burned down. The persecution of Christians by the old Soviet regime seems both overwhelming and lost in time. Yet it began by the slow erosion...

Aug 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 2026