Dr. Josh Herring is professor of classical education and humanities at Thales College in Wake Forest, N.C., where he teaches liberal arts courses and directs the Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy program. He also hosts The Optimistic Curmudgeon podcast and tweets @TheOptimisticC3.
Posts by Josh Herring
May 19, 2026
Bad history books litter the shelves of classrooms, bookstores, and libraries everywhere. Beyond mere factual inaccuracies, bad works of history also pretend to neutrality, prefer a Marxist materialism to messy human motivations, and misalign the significance of events.
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April 14, 2026
Carl Trueman is a prophet of late modernity. Not a prophet in the predictive sense but in the biblical sense: one called to remind Israel of who their God is and why their only hope of flourishing lies within, rather than without, the covenant He made with them.
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March 11, 2026
Michael S. Rose’s
The Subversive Art of a Classical Education: Reclaiming the Mind in an Age of Speed, Screens, and Skill-Drills is the latest addition to the growing genre of books about classical education.
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February 11, 2026
While reading
Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life one can’t help but recall Josef Pieper’s
Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Written just after WWII, Pieper asked what new world the Allies would build in the ruins of the old.
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December 16, 2025
Few have described the modern opposition to Christian truth as compellingly as Paul Kingsnorth in
Against the Machine. Kingsnorth describes modernity in a vision:
I saw a great wave of symbolic meaning.
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October 01, 2025
Leah Libresco Sargeant’s
The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto depicts a human ideal for the post-industrial workforce. Such a human can work any number of hours, has no personal entanglements, and suffers from no bodily needs:
Through a combination of pressure and compensation, the company has succeeded in denying basic biological reality and making that contradiction the
employees’ problem.
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July 02, 2025
In
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis suggests that technology functions as a bait-and-switch: Users think they’re getting power, but they’re actually giving up their freedom. “What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.”
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April 30, 2025
Late modernity has inherited a revolutionary spirit, and sex is the easiest place to see that spirit and its costs. The harms of the Sexual Revolution are rampant: Dating culture has collapsed; hookup culture is unsatisfying; the decline in marriage and birth rates have become a rallying cry for policymakers and conservatives alike.
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January 29, 2025
Is life worth living? Are the forms of Western life conducive to happiness? These questions are best asked in the form of a novel, and raising such questions is Michel Houellebecq’s strength.
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December 17, 2024
For at least 20 years, Christian leaders have made the same argument: Culture is shaped by movies; movies are secular and immoral; therefore, making Christian movies will move culture toward Christ.
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