The recent controversy over the anti-Catholic group hosted by the L.A. Dodgers recalls scandals of baseball’s past. Yet the all-American game always manages to bounce back. You can thank great performances on the field—just don’t forget the fans. Read More… On June 16, some 2,000 people gathered outside Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium to protest the team’s having chosen to honor, on the field before that night’s game, a group whose core mission and purpose is the open mockery and parody...

The highly successful series of fantasy novels is slowly being adapted into TV entertainment. Is it heroic fantasy intended to instill moral courage in the face of evil, or merely more streaming content? Read More… The Wheel of Time is a series of 14 novels by Robert Jordan, which debuted in 1990. You may never have heard of them, but they’ve sold 100 million copies and add up to more than 4 million words. (The Bible is well short of...

It never has to be faith versus reason. Centuries of Christian philosophical and scientific inquiry attest to this. Read More… “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth.” Twenty-five years ago today, Pope John Paul II (JPII) opened his 13th papal encyclical, Fides et Ratio, with these profound, beautiful, and now familiar words. The missive launches...

Attacks on the Constitution are popular these days, but a look at the original debates pro and con should reassure us as to what a gift it was and remains to the Republic. Read More… Constitutional questions used to be intellectually serious, steeped peting traditions, and shaped by schools of thought often rooted in divergent interpretations of the American past. No more. Now we get pressing questions like, “Can Trump run for president from prison?,” Congressmen asserting that “the Electoral...

Bestselling author Ellen Vaughn (The Jesus Revolution) has just brought out the second volume of an authorized biography of Elisabeth Elliot, who was, and remains, an inspiration to evangelical Christians around the world. Read More… With over 24 books to her credit, renowned biographer and New York Times bestselling author Ellen Vaughn is out with her second volume on the life and work of Elisabeth Elliot, the noted Christian author, speaker, and philosopher who died in 2015 after a 10-year...

President Biden’s attempts to erase large portions of student loan debt miss the larger moral picture. Read More… A new school year has just begun, and students and their parents are faced once again with the high cost of higher education. The Supreme Court ruled President Biden’s executive order on student loan forgiveness unconstitutional. Undeterred, the president has since expanded e-based repayment. Predictably, Democrats defended it and Republicans attacked it. Meanwhile, many continue to struggle with student debt. Tuition has...

No matter how scary the economy may look today, you have more control over your economic future than you think. Get back to basics: both principle and habits. Read More… The need for economic education has never been more apparent. In an inflationary economy with housing costs outpacing first-time homebuyer budgets, banking collapses, and a popping tech bubble, the need for sound economics is self-evident. St. Thomas Aquinas defined self-evident as that which the intellect clearly apprehends; today, it is...

Despite the dour statistics about declining church attendance, religious faith seems to be experiencing a revival. What role did the New Atheists ironically play in it? And what is its future? Read More… In the latter half of the 19th century, the poet Matthew Arnold, on his honeymoon, was walking with his bride along the rocky shoreline of the English Channel as the tide was going out. The sound made him think of “the Sea of Faith,” which was once...

When we think of cultural invention, human flourishing, and technological innovation, we tend also to think of great cities. A look at 40 of them proves instructive as to what makes true progress possible. Read More… What is progress? How and where does it occur? Such questions are not easy to answer. Debates about the nature of progress have given rise to entire theories of historical development. “Whig history,” for example, relates the story of humanity as one of a...

A new anthology of economists mentators pushing back against the New Deal in the 1930s sheds fresh light not only on what was going wrong then but what’s still wrong with our economic policy now. Read More… The American Institute of Economic Research has published an anthology of critics of the New Deal, New Deal plete with more than 50 mentaries and excerpts. The book is edited by contemporary economic historian Amity Shlaes, herself a prominent New Deal critic, whose...