Just before Thanksgiving, writer-director Jim Abrahams died at the age of 80. He was the A in ZAZ—the most prolific comedic team of the 1980s, the Zs being his school friends, the Zucker brothers, David and Jerry. Continue Reading...
Latest Posts
December 04, 2024
A Good Troublemaker: Jimmy Lai’s Story of Hardship and Heroism
“For them, I am a troublemaker. It is hard for them not to clamp down on me and silence me.” On August 10, 2020, Jimmy Lai, entrepreneur and media mogul, was arrested in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy protests that engulfed Hong Kong. Continue Reading...
December 03, 2024
The Long Financial Shadow of 2008
If you ask most people today what caused the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent “Great Recession,” my suspicion is that the answer would be something like “untrammeled and unregulated financial markets.” Continue Reading...
November 27, 2024
How Trade Saved the Pilgrims, and the U.S.
By now the Pilgrims’ disastrous experiment with collectivism in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is well-known, in free market circles if not among the young. The story has been printed and popularized – Rush Limbaugh even recites it annually on his radio program. Continue Reading...
November 26, 2024
Christianity Against Power-Worship
All modern politics is a clash of totalizing ideologies seeking absolute power. Or at least it seems that way. Christians sometimes find themselves caught in the middle of these culture wars, stuck trying to find compromises between competing goods. Continue Reading...
November 21, 2024
A Gentleman in Moscow Is More than Mere Entertainment
When Vladimir Lenin seized control of Russia in 1917, his Bolshevik government ended centuries of autocratic rule, replacing it with an all-consuming tyranny of its own. Within half a century, over 18 million Russians would pass through forced-labor camps and more than 25 million would be dead. Continue Reading...
November 20, 2024
What Is Liberalism?
“When the enemy is Hitler,” F.H. Buckley writes, “and the world is divided between Schmittian friends and enemies, everything is permitted.”
Such divisive contemporary issues as Black Lives Matter, the Israel-Palestine war, and trans rights leave little room for compromise and much for demonization. Continue Reading...
November 19, 2024
The Hidden Ideology of Megachurch Marketing
As an unofficial member of “Weird Christian Twitter,” I had kept up fairly well with the onslaught of pastoral sex scandals this past summer. It was only a peek into an otherwise quite active stream of controversy over how abuse cases had been handled (or just ignored) by prominent evangelical leaders, from the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and from John MacArthur to Doug Wilson. Continue Reading...
November 15, 2024
How the West Moved Beyond Racism and Tribalism
John M. Ellis’ A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism is an important book. It defends the values and history of Western civilization underlying the political and economic systems that have produced the prosperous and multifaceted world Westerners currently enjoy. Continue Reading...
November 14, 2024
Living in Wonder Enchants the Heart but Leaves the Mind Confused
It’s commonly noted that the Western world is showing signs of decline. With historically high rates of depression and anxiety, low trust in institutions, and rapid population decline, many fear the consequences if nothing changes. Continue Reading...
