Latest Posts

January 15, 2025

Trump II, a New Majority, and the End of Identity Politics

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was undoubtably a referendum on the current political trajectory of the United States. He won both the popular vote, the first Republican since 2004 to do so, and a significant Electoral College majority, securing the largest electoral margin for a Republican since George H.W. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2025

Thinking Critically about Critical Theory

Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.” Continue Reading...
January 09, 2025

The Historian as Priestly Gardener

Contemporary Western culture is profoundly ahistorical, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker reasons in her latest book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. The Australian professor devotes the first quarter of the book to making the case that, around 2010, the occidental world entered this “phase of late modernity,” to which she assigns the moniker “the Ahistoric Age.” Continue Reading...
January 08, 2025

Jordan Peterson’s Bible Study

If there’s one thing Jordan B. Peterson has proved in his almost-decade run as an internationally known public intellectual, it’s that he can fight. Since his 2016 criticism of a Canadian law for effectively compelling speech related to the use of certain gender pronouns, the professional psychologist and academic has taken on a host of rhetorical sparring partners on Canadian, British, and Australian television; he’s also argued with prominent politicians, scientists, academics, and bloggers. Continue Reading...
January 07, 2025

The Liberty-Virtue Dance

Conservative politics in 2025 faces a defining moment. The long-standing fusion of moral traditionalism and political libertarianism has lost its once dominant influence, with the risk of becoming irrelevant. Under Vice President-elect J.D. Continue Reading...
December 31, 2024

This New Year—Be Still

Open any paper, anywhere, anytime. In it you will find the news. There were many news stories throughout 2024 featuring the rise and fall of governments. Some orderly and peaceful through elections, as in the United States. Continue Reading...
December 24, 2024

Bloody Sunday, Black Friday, and Christmas

In the opening track to their now-classic 1983 album, War, Irish rock band U2 sang about “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” I can’t believe the news today Oh, I can’t close my eyes and make it go away … Broken bottles under children’s feet Bodies strewn across the dead-end street But I won’t heed the battle call It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall Bono was supposedly singing about the “Bloody Sunday” of January 20, 1972, in which 26 unarmed protesters were shot by British troops in Bogside in Derry, Northern Ireland. Continue Reading...