Category: Notes on Books

In Plato’s final treatise, The Laws, he insisted cosmology and theology serve as a necessary “prelude” to a good society.  Should a people embrace the “heresy” that the cosmos has “been framed, not by any action of mind, but by nature and chance only,” Plato said, social chaos inevitably ensues.  Thus the history of philosophy reveals a truly “cosmic struggle” pitting theists (e.g. Plato) against atheists (e.g. Democritus), shaping and setting forth divergent worldviews that are still very much with us.  Two-and-a-half millennia later, the noted physicist John Wheeler acknowledged that “every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation.”  To him, and to many others on the cutting edge of science, what’s really real is not stuff but forms.  It’s information that’s at the heart of it all.  There are big questions to address:  Where did I come from?  Why am I here?  Where am I going?  Does life have any meaning and purpose?  Is there any Design to Reality or is all there is a random collection of subatomic bits of matter?

A few years ago a renowned atheistic philosopher, Thomas Nagal, published Mind and Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, igniting a firestorm of hysterical outrage in the secular world.  Before publishing this treatise he had refrained from openly questioning the entrenched naturalistic Weltanschauung of his peers such as Francis Crick, who said:  “You, your joys and your sorrows, you memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.  Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”  To challenge Crick and his allies took courage, but Nagel did the real work of a philosopher—following the evidence and seeking the truth rather than tacking to the winds of elite opinion.  For a long time, Nagal said, he had found scientific materialism inadequate, so he began to seriously consider the possibility that mind, rather than matter, shapes Reality.    

Consequently:  “My guiding conviction is that mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature” (p. 16).  This is particularly evident when we turn our attention to what we know best—ourselves!  “Something more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures whose bodies and brains are composed of those elements.”  Unfortunately:  “Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends” (p. 18).  Far better, he decided, is the old Aristotelian conception of “teleological laws” guiding natural processes.  In addition to matter-in-motion, there may well be “something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them” (p. 123).  Inasmuch as consciousness, rationality and morality define us as human beings—and inasmuch as evolutionary naturalism cannot explain these fundamental realities—we must, Nagel says, open our minds to better ways of thinking and understanding the universe. 

Decades earlier C.S. Lewis said much the same, insisting our minds cannot be reduced to material entities.  We cannot escape a logical dilemma, he said:  “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms” (Possible Worlds).  Such “scientism,” Lewis said, assumed a metaphysical materialism he often labeled “Naturalism,” making a simple generalization that was neither simplistic nor hasty, differentiating Naturalism from Supernaturalism.  He insisted (in Miracles) that thinkers like Carl Sagan, who declared that “the cosmos is all there is or ever will be” and take the philosophical position that only Nature exists, irrationally restrict the realm of Reality to atoms moving through space.   

To such questions Spencer Klavan turns in his recently published Light of the Mind, Light of the World:  How New Science is Illuminating Ancient Truths about God (New York: Regnery, c. 2024; Kindle Edition).  Klavan is an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books and hosts a podcast titled “Young Heretics” devoted to discussing great literary works.  Equipped with a classics degree from Yale, he has written several books distinguished by both erudition and engaging style.  He seeks to show in this book “how God reveals himself through science and human experience.  It is a story about how the natural world once seemed alive with spirit and divine fire, and how it might be starting to seem that way again” (p. 15).  For too long we’ve taken it for granted that the cosmos is basically a huge machine with discrete parts following predictable patterns.  It’s all, as Democritus and Lucretius decreed long ago, nothing more than atoms-in-motion.  We’ve done so because it’s the picture presented in the standard science textbooks used in our schools and universities.  But  Klavan thinks this model has “become outdated, though we haven’t yet fully realized it.  The argument of this book is that our latest discoveries about the natural world do not make humanity look irrelevant or God seem obsolete.  Just the opposite: the world described by science increasingly looks like the world revealed by faith.  The lights are coming back on” (p. 15).  

One of the lights ever shining within us is the deep desire to find order and purpose in the universe.  Surely there really is a wholeness—an ordered arrangement—that enables us to understand it.  Alongside that awareness is a similar conviction that “the human mind is not an accident.  It is stamped with a certain inescapable structure that gives order to our perceptions, that funnels them into language and textures them with meaning, that discerns in the physical world a character of harmony.  That world does not simply appear to us as a hectic concatenation of unrelated parts but as an organic whole:  freighted with significance, woven through with cause and consequence, shuddering everywhere with tempting whispers of a grander harmony than we can yet discern” (p. 18).  If we “can  truly know anything at all—and we believe it can—then when it reaches out beyond itself it must encounter more than matter.  It must encounter another mind.  That is the argument of this book” (p. 19).  

The argument’s actually quite ancient, beginning in ancient Greece, when thinkers such as Thales pondered philosophical and scientific matters.  These “pre-Socratic” philosophers sought to identify the simplest element in the physical world (such as water, air, fire) that forms the world.  They believed they could only know through sense perception.  As Aristotle reported, these men focused on the hyle (sheer stuff) that mysteriously moves and makes things.  But they could not explain precisely how it actually happened or what caused it.  Neither water nor air spontaneously generates much of anything, much less living creatures.  What or Who made things move?  If there’s more to the world than matter-in-motion how can we know it?  Ultimately one man, Plato, thought he had the answer—there’s a non-material, mental world that gives form and life to the material world.  In many of his dialogues, “Plato’s own teacher, Socrates, gnaws relentlessly at the question of what exists besides ‘the things you can touch and see and perceive by the other senses’” (p. 36). 

Klavan skillfully shows how insights from Plato and Aristotle shaped the Western mind for centuries, enabling Christians such as Augustine and Aquinas to synthesize reason and revelation and set forth a distinctive worldview.  It was a world enlivened by the Spirit of God.  But in the late Middle Ages some scholars began to think of the cosmos as more clock-like than organic, more limited by laws than alive with spiritual beings.  Then Copernicus discerned a sun-centered cosmos that replaced the earth-centered cosmos of the ancients.  His rather guarded ideas took a sharper turn in the hands of Galileo, in whom we see much that make the modern scientific mindset.  Determined to make “the essence of the universe manifest to the senses,” Galileo returned to a rather pre-socratic position, allowing only material objects and causes to be considered by scientists such as himself.  Mix in Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes and a new view of the world emerged midway through the 17th century.  “Gradually a new picture of the world was taking shape . . . .  It was called ‘the mechanical philosophy’:  a conviction that the world was made of bodies whose movements and collisions were as sharply regulated as those displayed by an intricately calibrated machine.  And like any machine, the world of moving bodies could be best understood by taking it apart and examining its most basic components.  Suddenly the theory of atoms had new appeal” (p. 82). 

Modernity’s mechanistic philosophy is almost always associated with the legendary Sir Isaac Newton, though he himself would have qualified much of it.  In 1687 he published Principia Mathematica, one of the most monumental treatises ever penned, identifying “laws” governing phenomena such as thermodynamics and gravity as fundamental forces everywhere impactful.  Though he basically described the universe as an intricate mixture of matter-in-motion—particles moving about space—he also acknowledged that:  “God, who gave animals self-motion beyond our understanding, is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies, which we may understand as little.”  Personally a devout, if somewhat unorthodox, Christian, Newton insisted “that the order he observed in nature must come pouring forth from one mind, which created and sustained the world:  ‘the appearances of things,” he wrote, could reveal to human eyes the visible imprint of God’s invisible hand” (p. 87). 

By seizing aspects of Newton’s work and ignoring parts of it they found uncongenial, numbers of scientists insisted the cosmos is a clock-like machine needing no divine guidance.  They “led man into exile, away from the lovingly created universe of the medieval God” and declared we live in “a cosmos dominated by new powers, mindless and uncaring but wondrously reliable.”  Atoms replaced gods, becoming, says Klavan, “small gods, the tiny bodies and invisible forces that would come to move through the human imagination in eternal and unbreakably regular patterns.  Peering intently at their clockwork motion, scientists could hope that one day they might even rule over these mighty entities, the sons of man elevated to the status of lords among deities.  The small gods were unseen but awesomely powerful, capable of exerting their will throughout the unending regions of space. They were everlasting, they were perfectly rational, and above all, they behaved. The energy that moved among them was enough to govern the world” (p. 89).  

The personification of this mechanistic philosophy appeared a century after Newton in Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, who “would claim for Newton’s laws a dominion far vaster than Newton himself would ever have countenanced:  practically everything worth explaining, he thought, could be explained in material terms.  Here was a hinge point in the history of physics, a moment when the God of the Bible seemed to recede from the world” (p. 93).  Literally everything, it seemed to popularizers of Newton such as Voltaire, could be reduced to matter and mathematical laws.  This included man—“the machine” as some erudite thinkers declared.  “Gradually,” Klavan says, “the world was going dark.  Those who reduced humanity to its material origins found themselves hemmed into a closed system, trapped in the increasingly mechanistic jaws of nature’s logic” (p. 111). 

Nietzsche saw what happened in this process:  “‘There was a time when one looked to feel man’s greatness by indicating his divine origin:  this way is forbidden now, for at its entryway stands the ape, wrote Nietzsche in 1881.  Man’s pudenda origo, his ‘shameful origin’ in mere nature, revealed him as a pitiable thing of flesh’” (p. 115).  If human beings are nothing but animals, as Darwinians declared, there’s nothing special about them.  All the nice rhetoric about right and wrong, about meaning and purpose and God and immortality, has no standing in the ruthlessly material world of science.  As material beings, it follows (as Karl Marx insisted) that history was also determined by material concerns.  No longer could man imagine himself as homo sapiens!  He’s homo faber, the maker, a worker shaping his environment in accord with his needs.  

But just when it seemed mechanism was securely established cracks began to appear in its edifice.  What seemed settled by Newton was unsettled by Albert Einstein:  “‘All physicists of the last century saw in classical mechanics a firm and final foundation for all physics, yes, indeed, for all natural science,’ he later explained.  But this ‘dogmatic faith’ in atomic motion, this worship of the small gods, simply could not explain the behavior of light” (p. 134).  The Newtonian clock-like universe began to “slip and slide and even disappear!” (p. 135).  Once we had the instruments to see inside them, atoms looked like tiny foci of energy rather than hard little bits of matter.  The famous formula E=mc2 “raised the dizzying possibility that material particles, the rigid and dependable bodies whose motion was described by Newton’s physics, might simply dissolve into the sea of energy that now seemed to throb and churn beneath the surface of the solid world” (p. 136).   Light, the singular constant in the universe, sometimes seemed to act like a wave—and then it looked like tiny particles hurling through space.  Matter becomes energy and energy becomes matter!  But what, precisely, is energy?  “From the depths of Greek antiquity, from the very beginnings of science, an old question could be heard echoing louder and louder, though once it had seemed settled:  just what, after all, is the world made of?” (p. 146).  

Thence came the “quantum revolution” forever disproving simplistic materialism.  “An entire picture of the world was being erased:  the picture of the mechanical universe, with its solid moving parts churning on unseen, was beginning to fade and dissolve.”  Einstein himself resisted the implications of his work, refusing to “countenance what he called the ‘ghost waves’ and ‘dice games’ of quantum mechanics” (p. 158).  But he was clinging to an outmoded worldview.  Following physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, “pioneers of quantum physics were forced to grapple with the possibility that their discoveries might—in the words of . . . James Murphy—‘reduce the last building stones of the universe to something like a spiritual throb that comes as near as possible to our concept of pure thought.’  Bodies in motion were not the heart of things:  they arose out of a darker and more mysterious well, resolving before human eyes into the familiar shapes described by geometry.  Perhaps it was only when they could be seen by a conscious observer that ‘objects’ made any sense at all.  This was an ancient truth.  It had been hinted at in scripture and wisdom literature all along” (p. 159).   

This ancient truth can be simply stated:  mind matters!  There’s a mental as well as a physical dimension to Reality.  Our minds—and a Divine Mind—play a vital role in our world.  “The world is made in the meeting of mind with matter.  This lost truth is coming back to us now” (p. 163).  “And that’s why it was no accident that quantum physics began with an age-old puzzle:  what is light?  The very nature of the question forced us to consider ourselves.  The only reason we can ask it at all is because light is something we see.  That’s how we know to ask about anything:  because we experience it somehow.  We ask why stones fall and planets fly because we see them do it; we wonder what blood is because we feel the life draining from us when we bleed.  But light has a special kind of property.  It is both a visible thing, and also the cause of vision.”   In fact:  “Light isn’t just one of many things we see.  It’s also the reason why we see anything.  This simple fact has given new meaning to a very old idea:  there are two kinds of light.  There is the kind that we see, and the kind that makes us able to see.  The light of the world, and the light of the mind” (p. 165).  As the Psalmist said:  “With thee is the fountain of life; in thy light we shall see light” (Ps 36:9).  

Light floods the world and “it may be literally true that light holds the world together.  Even in the farthest reaches of space there is a ‘cosmic microwave background,’ a form of radiation that is thought to have endured from when the universe began.”  How amazing it is to find in the Bible God saying “let there be light, and there was light.”  “But there is a far deeper meaning to all this.  Material reality is only an outward sign of a more profound truth.  It has been said since antiquity that there are really not one but two suns:  the invisible one, which makes reason and knowledge possible, and its physical copy, the visible sun we see shining above us” (p. 177).  The world was formed when a formless earth received illumination from a mind that saw it and named it:  the claim of Hebrew scripture is that the first light did not come out of matter into mind,  but out of mind into matter” (p. 178).  God thought and spoke and there was light.  

There’s an ancient and self evident philosophical axiom known to Aristotle:  ex nihilo, nihil (from nothing, nothing).  But defying all logic and ignoring considerable evidence, today’s monistic materialists declare that something—indeed all things actually came from nothing!  Indeed, a decade ago a physicist/cosmologist, Lawrence M. Krauss, could publish A Universe from Nothing:  Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing trying to show, how the universe literally came from nothing.  Realizing the linguistic pit he was digging, however, he tried to re-define the word “nothing” to mean (it seems to me):  “well, almost nothing,” since there’s actually a mysterious but necessarily material realm that magically gives birth to the material world.  In fact, he admits, something actually comes from a pre-existence something.  

Krauss and his coterie are trying to evade the implications of what has increasingly been clear:  the universe came into being in an instant.  Scientists call it the “Big Bang,” but Christians call it creatio ex nihilo, an ancient doctrine now made credible, for “reason itself is compelling us” to see past purely physical things, venturing into realms “behind the thinnest instants of primeval time” when matter didn’t exist.  “No thought that tries to cross that barrier can carry with it any mathematical models or physical shapes, no clothes or crutches to grasp on to.  The mind must go there naked, as it was made, and meet with the mirror image of itself.  For on the other side of that barrier is not void but fullness, the limitless soil of being, the golden womb from whose substance the world was made.  And it is not water, as Thales imagined, nor prime matter, as the alchemists thought, nor particles nor quantum fields.  The world is made at last from none of those.  It is made from the deep that cries out to deep, from the light that meets each mind at the threshold of existence with a servant’s silent welcome and a king’s stately proclamation, bound up together in one saying:  ‘I AM’” (p. 189).

The world exists because of the great I AM.  We can know it because our minds are designed to see design, to know why things are as well as what they are, to name them as well as note their contours.  “When we see things, our minds give shape to them.  In the most profound sense, according to Genesis, we give things names.  . . . .  More was bestowed on the animals that day than just sounds.  The names we form with our mouths or write on a page are the tip of an iceberg whose unseen mass hovers in the silent depths of the soul.  Spoken words are the final product of a process that begins, as the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas knew, in the mind and the heart.  The intellect, wrote Aquinas, ‘receives a light’ from the species of each thing it perceives—that is, we see the kind of thing it is, in the way it appears to us” (p. 205).   We form words because the world was made by the Word.  “For the logos—the ‘firstborn of creation,’ the word that is before any written letter or spoken sound, the reason and meaning that cannot be altered or gainsaid—was infused into matter from the moment it was created.  There was never just ‘stuff,’ mere objects, matter without mind.  Each and every thing that was made was invested with more than material properties, suffused with ‘life, and the life was the light of all mankind.  Man, in God’s image, draws forth the true character of His creation, a world not only of objects in space but of virtue and desire, longing and loveliness.  We are here to give names to what the Word has made” (p. 209).

Concluding his treatise Klavan says we’re now living when both “cutting-edge science and inherited wisdom” provide us a picture of a “world spoken into being by the eternal Word and made complete by the words of his creatures, who bear his image on Earth.”  It’s a significant corrective to the secular narrative, but it’s the only one that truly matters—“the proclamation that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (p. 216).  

That we’re made by God for God explains one of the most powerful and persistent longings of the human heart.  Paul Johnson, a prolific English journalist/historian noted for publishing some 50 treatises (including Intellectuals, Modern Times and A History of Christianity) recently died, leaving leaving behind a personal testimony titled  The Quest for God:  A Personal Pilgrimage (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 1996; Kindle Edition).  He wrote the book because he believed:  “The existence or non-existence of God is the most important question we humans are ever called to answer” (p. 1).  Yet today, despite the extraordinary proliferation of technology, rooted in what’s called information, “our ignorance of God also tends to increase.  We are less sure about what God is, or what he means to us, than our parents were, just as they were less clear and confident about God than their parents” (p. 4).

This being said, it’s remarkable that a certain level of belief in God remains.  Try as we may, it seems we cannot quite persuade ourselves that God is dead!  It would certainly seem, given the horrors of the 20th century, that we would have abandoned any belief in a good God who works providentially within our world.  Yet we have not.  Instead we often turn to God for solace and help.  In part, Johnson think, this is because atheistic philosophies have failed to adequately explain why our our world exists and how we ourselves experience it.  Though individual atheists may live exemplary lives, too many purely secular thinkers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre (whose pernicious ideas influenced Pol Pot in Cambodia) demonstrated an “extraordinary squalor, selfishness, confusion, cruelty and not least cowardice of his own life” (p. 22).  Though Marxism was “created by an intellectual crook who constantly invented and manipulated his so-called ‘scientific evidence’” resurfaced under the guise of Liberation Theology, “an anti-Christian heresy, without any moral basis” that has proved itself to be a source of “violence and great moral evil” (p. 29).  In short:  “There is no substitute for God:  this our own dreadful century has abundantly proved.” 

To Johnson, Christian theism provides the best understanding of God.  It blends natural and special revelation to give persuasive answers to life’s great questions.  “Natural Law has thus been part of Christianity since its inception and that is as it should be, because Natural Law is a form of moral absolutism and therefore akin to Christian teaching, which I believe is true for all times and peoples.”  The “moral relativism” so influential in modern times results from turning away from the Natural Law.  To deny the reality of absolutes, Johnson thinks, is demonstrably evil—“a great evil, one of the greatest of all evils because it makes possible so many other evils” (p. 67).  It’s the “cardinal sin” of the 20th century.  His deep attachment to and support of the Roman Catholic Church comes, in part, from her traditional commitment to absolutes (in dogma and morals)—the perennial things that ultimately matter most.

Johnson devotes many chapters to explaining basic Christian beliefs, noting how they have given him direction throughout his life, concluding with an essay on prayer, “the most important chapter in my book.”  We may not be able to begin to understand God, and we may be confused in many ways, but “we can all pray.  It is the one resource that can never be taken away from us except by the total collapse of our minds” (p. 184).  At times, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” may be all we can say, but it’s still an efficacious prayer.   Praying the Psalms—an ancient practice embedded in the worship of the Church—is one way of consistently talking with God.  Written prayers—and writing one’s own prayers—have proved helpful to Johnson, as is going to church on a daily basis when possible, and he encourages us to find ways to join him in talking with our Father.

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In God on Stage:  15 Plays that Ask the Big Questions (Elk Grove Village, IL:  Word On Fire, c. 2024; Kindle Edition), Peter Kreeft activates his philosopher’s acuity to show how great playwrights have brought God into their artistic works.  He considers himself a “tour guide,” and he wants us simply to Stop, Look, and Listen!  Take note of what some great seers have seen.  “The world’s a stage,” says Joseph Pearce, “and we are all called to play our part in the drama of life and love.  Peter Kreeft doesn’t merely play a part.  He plays many parts, and he plays them all so well.  He is one of our age’s greatest philosophers.  He is a great apologist.  He is a very good writer.  He entertains.  He makes us smile.  He makes us laugh.  He makes us look at ourselves and each other in a new light.  And now, this tried and tested guide to life guides us through some of the greatest plays ever written.  Those wishing to go deeper into the meaning of life and death, and the mystery of love and suffering, will find no better guide than Peter Kreeft.”

Kreeft explores five important questions, looking at plays illustrating the pagan, Christian, and post-Christian perspectives.  In dramas dealing with “life and joy,” he finds the pagan view evident in a radio play, “Under Milk Wood,” written by the 20th century poet Dylan Thomas shortly before he died.  Setting forth the play’s main theme, one of the characters exclaims:  “Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?”  Kreeft thinks these words set forth “the central theological point, the God-point, so to speak, for God is not absent or dead, He is simply “off-center.  And loved, however anonymously and implicitly. That’s the point, the ‘thank God:  the cosmic gratitude” (p. 22).  Thus pagans often have a certain “pietas,” a sense of gratitude for the goodness of life rooted in their love of nature.  The Christian position on the same issue can be found in Thornton  Wilder’s classic “Our Town,” a play that “lets us see life from the viewpoint of the dead” (p. 34).  The play does not give us “a human perspective about God but a divine perspective about man.  . . . .  God lives inside Wilder’s house, in his soul, in his eyes, in his perspective” (p. 37).  Radically different from “Our Town” is Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” wherein God is utterly absent.  It’s a play without a plot or meaning.  The characters do nothing but wait around for Someone who never comes.  Consequently:  “The absence of God’s presence in Waiting for Godot is really the presence of his absence; and that is a real presence!  If you want to see what difference God makes to everything (and to Everything), this is one of the most helpful books you can ever read” (p. 57).

Turning to dramas dealing with religion, we find the great Greek tragedian Aeschylus representing paganism.  His “Prometheus Bound”—“the first and oldest of all great plays” Kreeft discusses—deals with “man’s relationship to the gods, and to Fate, which rules over all, men and gods alike”. (p. 59).  Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, enabling him to make civilizations.  For his effort Prometheus is chained to a rock and suffers endlessly thereafter.  Devout pagans have their good points, but ultimately they cannot escape the chains of despair.  Quite different is the Christian religion as depicted in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” a moving portrayal of St. Thomas More, whom Samuel Johnson called “the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced.”  Kreeft considers the play his  “candidate for the most perfect movie ever made.” (p. 68).  Bolt’s play tells the story of More’s resistance to King Henry VIII that led to his execution, but the play “is also about God,” who gave More reason for living and dying.  

A Christian drama dealing with suffering is ‘Shadowlands,” wherein C.S. Lewis is shown responding to his wife’s death.  “Lewis,” Kreeft says, “is my candidate for the most brilliant and effective Christian apologist of modern times, and he is a very good selection to exemplify the Christian response to suffering, especially the very worst suffering of helplessly seeing someone whom we deeply and totally love gradually sink into death” (p. 95).  In his weeks of mourning Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, feeling as if his faith was a “house of cards”—lsomething critics have taken as a confession of despair.  But what he really discovered was that his fallible faith was in himself, not the One Whom he trusted.  Whereas Lewis kept the faith, his contemporary, an atheistic nihilist, Archibald MacLeish, had none.  His play, “J.B.” espoused the atheist’s ancient refrain:  “If God is God, he is not good; / If God is good, he is not God.”  MacLeish’s final “word is ‘nothing.’  That’s the devil’s favorite word.  Karl Marx’s favorite quotation, from Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, is ‘Everything that exists deserves to perish.”’  That’s the devil’s philosophy and ultimate goal” (p. 109).  Nothing really matters in a world of nothing but matter.  

Turning to one of the four “last things” we mortals face, Kreeft discusses plays dealing with death.  “Nothing is more immediately important,” he says, “more difference making, than how we die.  Death is the most important journey we ever make. In fact, it is the only important journey we ever make, for life is the only important journey we make, and death is the last and determinative event in that journey that we call life” (p. 144).  Though Shakespeare is in profound ways a deeply Christian dramatist, Kreeft thinks his “Hamlet”—the “greatest play ever written”—reflects a pre-Christian view of death.  Hamlet’s great soliloquy asks the deepest of all questions:  To be or not to be.  In the play death itself is the protagonist, and in the end it prevails.  Thus the play’s a tragedy acknowledging the inexorability of Fate.  The terrifying aspect of death is damnation, a theme explored in another of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth, which treats it in a pre-Christian way.  “The consummation of Shakespeare’s psychology of damnation is Macbeth’s justly famous ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow’ speech, the very manifesto of nihilism.  Nihilism means literally nothing-ism, the ideology of nothingness.  Obviously, things still exist, but their value and purpose, their meaning and teleology, is gone, and therefore so is our hope.  Dante was right to put over hell’s door the warning:  ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’  Conscience is at the very heart of man, so that when God and conscience are dead in a man, as they are in Macbeth, when the voice of God dies, man dies as well, since man is God’s image—just as your reflection disappears from the mirror when you disappear from the room” (p. 181).  “Macbeth is living in an anticipation of his eternity in hell, whose entrance ticket is abandoning all hope and whose philosophy is nihilism:  nothingness, purposelessness, meaninglessness.  Life is not a story told by a wise and loving God but ‘a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’” (p. 183).

After death comes the Judgment—and the possibility of damnation.  A Christian interpretation of damnation is afforded by C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, a novel that lends itself to theatrical renditions.  The book faces a difficult question:  “Why would anyone freely choose damnation rather than salvation?”  Employing the words of Goerge MacDonald, Lewis notes:  “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing” (p. 195).   A series of vignettes reveal some of the  reasons explaining why people end up in hell, and they are all ultimately rooted in our desire to have our own way.  Ultimately, says Lewis:  “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God:  ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”  Those who refuse to do God’s will frequently slip into the view of Jean-Paul Sartre in his play, “No Exit,” declaring “hell is other people” and endorsing nihilism.  “God’s absence,” says Kreeft, “is more massive in this play than his presence is in most religious plays. Since there is no God, there is no purpose, reason, value, or design for human life, except the ones we invent ourselves” (p. 198).  

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As a businessman, Robert Trussell went through times of failure as well as success.  During a dark  time he found strength and direction as he recovered his Christian faith.  Hoping to encourage others to do likewise he wrote a short treatise:  The Logic That God Exists: A Handbook on Belief in God through Simple Reason to Bring You Peace  (Manchester, N.H.:  Sophia Institute Press, c. 2024;Kindle Edition).  He writes not for academics but for ordinary folks who need assurance, so the book’s not so much an accomplished work of apologetics as an encouraging word of testimony.  Though he knows many people doubt God’s existence:  “The point of this book is to show that there is ample and compelling evidence that there is a God, and further that Jesus was God and is God.  Contrary to some who say there’s no evidence, I maintain the opposite — it is impossible that there is not a God” (p. 8).  This is a bold declaration, but to folks who are open-minded it may very well be compelling.  

There’s a widespread, and generally unexamined, notion that the cosmos popped into existence by chance.  “Everything just happened by itself” we’re told.  To the extent this is explained we’re told about “evolution through natural selection.”  This idea, Trussell thinks, is “the root of many of the problems we face today.  It is entrenched in the culture, manifestly false, and should be removed from cultural orthodoxy” (p. 10).  Though evidences of microevolution abound, “it is tough to come up with examples of macroevolution where major species evolved into a different significant species.  Importantly, no evidence or theory exists of how this could work from inanimate objects growing into animate ones.”  After more than a century of intense investigation, “no intermediate fossil forms have been found for macroevolution from one species to another.  The fossil record shows no evidence of simple life forms transitioning into complex life forms. Instead, there was a virtual explosion of animal types during the Cambrian era” (p. 17).  

Rejecting naturalistic evolution leads Trussen to also reject the theory’s philosophical foundation in scientism, defined by one scholar as “an exaggerated kind of deference toward science, an excessive readiness to accept as authoritative any claim made by the sciences, and to dismiss every kind of criticism of science or its practitioners as anti-scientific prejudice.”  Replacing theism, scientism denies not only the reality of God but or goodness, truth, and beauty.  It’s an atheistic philosophy, not science itself , which “is all about logic. Logic dictates that something cannot come from nothing.  Therefore, science itself dictates that there has to be a God” (p. 27).  There are “laws” of nature that explain its workings.  These laws are not “things”—they are non-material realities governing things.  “It should be easy to understand that the laws of nature that run the universe could not have made themselves” (p. 28).  The laws of nature need a Law-giver.  To illustrate this, Trussen says:  “It takes about 2 billion lines of unique handwritten code by more than 25,000 engineers and a vast empire of computers and data centers spread throughout the entire globe to run Google.  But it takes more than 3 billion letters of unique genetic code arranged in a precise, specific manner, written inside a cell weighing 2,000 millionths of a gram, to run YOU, a far more complex and superior system than all of Google. Imagine looking at all that Google code and then me telling you it all evolved together on its own somehow.  So, what makes more sense?  That life and intelligence and the ability to think and love come from something that has life and intelligence and thinks and loves or that it comes from … random chaos” (p. 31).  

Still more:  to prove the “existence of God in a completely different way” one should consider the miracles and Person of Jesus Christ, who repeatedly said He was God’s Son.  He claimed (as John’s Gospel records in his “I AM” statements) to be the way, the truth and the life, the bread of life, the light of the world, the door of the sheep, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, and the true vine.  These are astounding claims, but reading about Him leads one to believe he was really Who He claimed to be.  His followers spread His Word throughout the world and the Church He founded stands as a witness to its transforming power.  “So dear readers,” Trussen says, “if Jesus did all these things, He was God; therefore, there is a God. I f He came down here, literally walked on water, and raised the dead, this becomes a spectacular reason to believe in God” (p. 50). 

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One of the most intriguing extra-biblical evidences for Jesus’s Resurrection is set forth by Gilbert Lavoie, M.D., in The Shroud of Jesus:  And the Sign John Ingeniously Concealed (Manchester, NH:  Sophia Institute Press, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  Years ago as a pre-med student the author found a copy of Dr. Pierre Barbet’s A Doctor at Calvary and began to look at Jesus through a medical doctor’s eyes.  Barbet “was the first to forensically confirm that the man of the shroud was definitely crucified” (p. 35).  This led Lavoie to study the Shroud of Turin—and, importantly, clues in John’s Gospel unveiled by it.  “Remarkably, John wrote about all the details that are seen on this Turin cloth.  They all correspond exactly to John’s description of Jesus’ torture, crucifixion, and death.  In other words, all the significant wounds on the shroud are found in John’s Gospel.  So, what John saw on the day Jesus died is exactly what happened to the man who was buried in this Turin cloth” (p. 43).

A lifetime of research led to the publication of this book, endorsed by Mike Aquilina as “a veritable summa of Shroud studies, incorporating evidence from disciplines as diverse as botany and history, chemistry and theology, Judaic studies and forensic science.  It leaves no stitch unexamined, no stones of history unturned.  Over the course of decades, Dr. Lavoie has tested every objection to the Shroud’s authenticity.  He details his findings here without ever bogging the narrative. The book would be a page-turner if only the photos weren’t so riveting!  You’ll want to stop and examine every one.”  I’ve been fascinated by shroud studies for years and fully agree with Aquilina—this is a treasure chest of detailed information setting for the best assessments now available on the subject.  

Modern studies of the shroud began in 1898 when it was discovered that its image was, incredibly, very much like a photographic negative.  Photographic techniques enabled scholars to analyze “the only ancient textile known to display the blood marks of a crucifixion.  But even more astonishing, this cloth also displays the negative image of a naked man who was crucified” (p. 24).  The shroud revealed fascinating details, including the fact that nails had not penetrated in the palms of the man’s hands (as had been depicted in artistic works for centuries) but his wrists—something now confirmed the remains of men executed by Romans in the first century.   In earlier centuries it was possible to argue that the shroud was painted by a medieval artist, but today’s powerful microscopes show us that no paint was used.  Indeed, you can “see that the individual fibers of each thread were yellowed.  It was these individual yellowed fibers of each thread, not paint, that caused the image” (p. 50).  We can now see “heme derivatives, bile pigments, and proteins” demonstrating that it’s human blood—blood that flowed from a tortured body—that colored the shroud.  Despite all our modern technologies no one has been able to reproduce such a shroud image.  Amazingly:  “the blood marks are a natural event, but the image formation is an event that is outside of our ordinary understanding of time and space” (p. 126).

Trying to better understand the shroud, Lavoie devised some experiments using human volunteers to make photographic negatives.  Perusing them, one picture of an upright man’s stood out.   “In awe, I sat there.  Then I stood up, and out of reverence for what I saw, I slowly backed away from the image of the shroud face that was on my living room mantel.  There was no denying it.  The light areas around the eyes, between the lips, and under the nose were all there.  The volunteer’s face had all the same characteristics as that of the shroud face.  This negative of my volunteer was photographed differently from the one taken when my volunteer was lying down.  This accidental discovery was the beginning of an understanding of the shroud image that I could have never realized in two lifetimes” (p. 130).  He was “overwhelmed” by the possibility that the shroud shows  “a reflection of the moment of his resurrection.  It was a moment in direct contrast from all that I previously understood.” (p. 141).  He’d thought the shroud had covered a prostate man.  But now he saw “the image of the upright man” demonstrating His Resurrection.  

This realization drove him back to a meticulous examination of John 12:32:   “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  Lavoie says, “It was the word lifted that brought forth an image of what I saw on the shroud” (p. 142).  Christ crucified arose—and it’s evident on the shroud!

Dissidents behind the Iron Curtain such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn frequently recited this mantra:  “Live not by lies.”  Indeed, said Solzhenitsyn:  “Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way:  Let their rule hold not through me!”  These dissidents simply updated the declaration of Jesus, who said Satan is the “father of lies” who inspires a vast panoply of misinformation leading multitudes astray.  In Toxic Empathy:  How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (New York:  Penguin Random House, c. 2024; Kindle Edition) Allie Beth Stuckey examines areas wherein well-intentioned believers embrace harmful positions.  In the name of “love” they support unloving acts. They do so by thinking empathetically—putting themselves in other persons’ situations—is compassion or kindness or love.  “But empathy alone is a terrible guide,” she says.  “It may be part of what inspires us to do good, but it’s just an emotion and, like all emotions, is highly susceptible to manipulation.  That’s exactly what’s happening today.  Empathy has been hijacked for the purpose of conforming well-intentioned people to particular political agendas.  Specifically, it’s been co-opted by the progressive wing of American society to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality.  I call it toxic empathy” (p. xii).  

Rightly defined, love is a commitment to another person’s well-being.  It certainly involves feelings but is primarily an act, doing what’s right and good.  Love and truth are laminated together—both are needed to establish Christian character.  Love cannot be entangled in lies.  Love cannot endorse evil behaviors.  Such things as “kindness and compassion are necessary components of love.  But empathy literally means to be in the feelings of another person.  Empathy by itself is neither loving nor kind; it’s just an emotion.”  Unfortunately:  “The erroneous conflation of love and empathy has convinced the masses that to be loving, we must feel the same way they do.  Toxic empathy says we must not only share their feelings, but affirm their feelings and choices as valid, justified, and good.  This confusion has not only made us a morally lost people but it’s also harmed the very people empathy-mongers claim they’re trying to help:  the truly marginalized and vulnerable” (p. xiii).

A few years ago Stuckey awakened to the fact that many pastors and spokesmen for evangelicalism had begun supporting immoral behaviors, saying they identified with groups suffering various forms of oppression.  Though claiming to be Christians they openly supported non-Christian behaviors.  Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Black Lives Matter became a lodestone for progressives who declared America to be a deeply racist country.  “Of course I believe black lives matter,” Stuckey says.   “But I knew from previous research that the organization Black Lives Matter, for which many black-square posters were soliciting donations, did not have goals I could get behind.  They are open about their radical left-wing ideals.  Now erased from BLM’s website was this:   ‘We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another’” (p. xxi).  She then began to study, seeking to understand why Christians would support BLM and other progressive political causes, including abortion, transgenderism, same-sex marriage, illegal immigration, and social justice.  

Progressives such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support abortion as a necessary component of “health care.”  Sad stories of women suffering difficulties as a result of an “unplanned pregnancies” seek to elicit feelings supporting their decisions to abort their babies.  We’re instructed to “feel the pain” of the mothers rather than defend their babies.  Nor are we allowed to feel the pain of women who often regret having aborted their children.  Euphemisms abound whenever abortion is endorsed, and it’s not allowed to even suggest an actual person is being killed in the procedure.  Ending the life of the developing baby, progressives say, is not murder—it’s “reproductive freedom,” validating a “woman’s  rights,” upholding her “autonomy.”  Professing Christians supporting abortion do so because they feel sorry for pregnant women.  They’re empathetic!  However:  “Empathy tells us only to care about how the pregnant mother is in that moment.  Truth and love demand that we recognize without qualification these babies’ right to live” (p. 29).  

Today’s most a vogue progressive cause is transgenderism, which holds that we’re not given a specific “gender” at conception but are free to “identify” with our inner feelings.  No less an authority than The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) differentiates between “gender” and “sex,” so you can be born a male (sexually) but identify as a woman (gender-wise)!   These pediatricians further support giving children treatments to make them more fully feel their chosen identity.  Joining the chorus, educators in the public schools have generally endorsed transgenderism, as is evident in books added to libraries and units prescribed in curricula.  To Stuckey, however:  “When it comes to gender, we know what the biological and biblical reality is.  There is no scientific nor scriptural category for a ‘gender identity’ that is independent from sex” (p. 56).  Despite considerable public (and even governmental) pressure, Christians must uphold the truth regarding biology and scripture.  To do so means we should be “exceedingly precise in our language, dropping terms like ‘biological female’ to describe a woman masquerading as a man, since that gives credence to the idea that it’s possible to be a nonbiological female . . . .  In other words, we refuse to lie” (p. 61).

We must also refuse to lie about “same-sex” marriage!  For centuries virtually everyone understood “marriage” united a man and a women in a relationship that is in principle procreative.  Stuckey has coined an “alliteration to help me remember why God’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman is so important:  Biblical marriage is Rooted in creation; it’s Reiterated throughout Scripture; it’s Repeated by Jesus; it’s Representative of Christ and the church; and therefore it’s Reflective of the Gospel” (p. 82).  But in 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court surfed with the shifting waves of public opinion and somehow (in Obergefell v. Hodges) found same-sex marriage protected by the Constitution!  Attuned to the culture prominent Christians such as the late Tim Keller began to endorse it as well.  It’s the law of the land, he seemed to think, and we must accept it.  Stuckey, however, disagrees:  ‘The law can permit sin, but Christians should not accept laws that approve of or are designed to make it easier to sin.  Put another way, it’s one thing for the law to allow same-sex attracted people to live with each other and even form lives together. . . .  But it’s another thing for the state to call “marriage” that which God declares is not marriage.  Then the state isn’t just allowing error, it is promoting and defending it—and making it easier for people to turn their backs on God” (p. 90).  

Since justice is one of the cardinal virtues and Christians have always sought to establish it in their world, “social justice” has easily been endorsed by churches and schools, pastors and professors.  “Within evangelicalism, conversations about social justice, especially as it pertains to race, have taken center stage” (p. 152).  But today’s “social justice” is hardly the kind of justice championed in the Bible!  It’s defined by the United Nations as:  “The fair and compassionate distribution of the fruits of economic growth”—meaning, as Kamala Harris said, “we all end up in the same place.”  This, Stuckey says, “includes not just ensuring job opportunities, but combating everything that may affect one’s ability to prosper:  sexism, racism, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination” (p. 132).  Closely examined, however, Stuckey finds little evidence for “systemic” racism, sexism, etc., and to the extent “social justice warriors” prevail in the U.S.A. much harm almost always results.  

Concluding her treatise, Stuckey says:  “Christians are commanded to love, and empathy can help us love well.  But empathy without biblical truth isn’t love at all—it’s hate.  It’s hate, because—just as Satan did with Eve in the Garden—affirming sin means nudging someone off the edge of the cliff” (p. 158).  Our job is to speak the truth, refuting Satan’s lies, doing what we can to establish Christ’s Kingdom, free from toxic empathy that misdirects our moral compass.  

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Anthony Esolen is one of America’s finest Christian writers, the author of some 30 books and a distinguished translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  His The Lies of our Time (Manchester, NH:  Sophia Institute Press, c.  1993, 2023; Kindle Edition) provides a masterful diagnosis on our morally diseased body politic and prescribes stout goblets of Truth as the remedy.  Esolen’s mastery of literature provides him ample fare for building his case, so that deeply philosophical issues gain visual clarity through apt illustrations.  

The first and most “fundamental lie of our time” declares there is no God, and failing to worship Him leads us to turn to creatures (naturalism) or human creations (humanism), two of the most prominent current worldviews.  Esolen skillfully sets forth credible reasons to believe in God as He revealed Himself to Moses—“He Who Is.”  The second lie says there is no objective moral truth.  Everything’s relative!  But throughout history man has had to deal with a troubled conscience!  Some things simply should not be done!  Written deeply into human nature is an awareness that our well-being requires certain moral certitudes.   As with the law of gravity, ignoring the natural law will destroy us. “There Is No Such Thing As Beauty” says lie number three.  We’re told that enjoying beauty is a purely personal feeling—“beauty is in the mind of the beholder.”  But Esolen declares it’s a reality that’s self-evident and needs no justification.  Thus:  “No one finds the bare wall beautiful” (p. 80).  The modern world features many “cults” of ugliness, but they cannot endure.  There’s beauty all around us and we profit from enjoying it.  

The fourth lie pretends “Human Nature Does Not Exist,” a view popularized by Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and his disciple Simone de Beauvoir.  In response, Esolen points to a host of unique human traits as evidence of our essence—speaking, forging social systems, worshipping, doing artistic work, etc.  Utopians always want to deny or alter human nature—as is painfully evident in the transgender movement—but reality has a way of surviving and thriving despite innovators’ endeavors.  Pascal said it well:  “The greatness and the wretchedness of man are so plain to see that the true religion must needs teach us that there is some great principle of greatness in man, and a great principle of wretchedness too” (Pensees, #430).  Lie number five holds that:  “The Foundation and the Fulfillment of All Human Society Is Equality.”  This position is strongly asserted by socialists of various sorts, including American progressives.  But “equality is a mathematical, mechanical, legalistic, or juridical notion” that cannot prevail in any healthy society.  Consequently:  “Societies that accept inequalities in station as a matter of course tend to be peaceful, while those that demand equality must be in a state of constant turmoil, because a narrow-eyed envy supplants humility” (p. 105).  

That “Cultural Progress Is Inevitable” is the sixth lie of our time.  Folks such as Barak Obama urge us to get “on the right side of history,” espousing a version of historicism rooted in Marxism.   Truth to tell, if we study such things as modern art, music, architecture, morality and family life, we live in an era of cultural decline—what T.S. Eliot described as a “wasteland.”  Prominent thinkers almost routinely invoke the word “barbarian” to describe what they see, and Esolen thinks evidence of decay abounds and easily refutes claims of cultural progress.  Most all forms of feminism embrace lie number seven, claiming that   “Western Christian Men Are to Blame for Everything.”  One need only read Shakespeare to learn that both men and women (e.g. both Lord and Lady Macbeth) do deadly things.  Creative, good men have enriched our world and must recognized for their contributions.  Demeaning an entire sex shows nothing more than irrational prejudice.  Consider the many technological inventions that have improved the lot of women—labor saving sewing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers.  “In this regard, the ingratitude and self-contradictions of feminists appear quite astonishing,” for they covet the devices while demeaning the men who developed them (p. 160). 

Mark Twain once quipped that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  So Esolen finds “statistics” the eighth lie we must guard against.  Whenever we consider important issues such as domestic violence or divorce or murder rates we’re easily misled by “statistics.”  Thus we’re told it’s absolutely good for certain ethnic or sexual groups to increasingly attend college, when we ought to wonder if they’re actually learning anything of significance.  Statistical studies may provide us useful information, but they can never address truly important things.  Wisdom cannot be found by counting!  

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Lucas Miles hosts a podcast—“The Epoch Times, Church & State with Lucas Miles”—which was named the 2023 “Program of the Year” by the National Religious Broadcasters organization.  He pastors a church in Indiana and is a popular speaker as well as the author of several books.  In his latest treatise, Woke Jesus:  The False Messiah Destroying Christianity (West Palm Beach, FL:  Humanix Books, c. 2023) he writes “to assemble a definitive resource on the history of Wokeness and its dangerous repercussions within the church (and what we can do about it)” (p. 10).  Doing so involves explaining its historical roots, most especially in a neo-Gnosticism “rooted in Hegelian and Marxist thought, reinforced by nefariously crafted arguments from feminists, diversity officers, Critical Theorists, communist elites, social justice activists, and ‘Woke’ pastors” (p. 13).  

Denying the deity of Jesus Christ marks most neo-Gnostics who follow Immanuel Kant in holding that Christ was “totally human,” though admittedly a wonderful example—“the prototype of a humanity well-pleasing to God.”  For today’s “woke” Christians, Jesus is invoked as a guide to liberating the oppressed (primarily blacks, women, gays and transexuals).  In the process Scripture is downgraded in order to elevate personal experience.  Woke advocates say you may disregard clear biblical texts but dare not challenge an individual’s story—his or her “own truth.”  Thus there are, Edward Feser says, a host of “apostate projects” such as progressivism and identity politics.  This includes Black Liberation Theology, largely shaped by James Cone, who endeavored to “analyze the satanic nature of Whiteness” and “prepare all non-Whites for revolutionary action.”  Cone’s Jesus is a social reformer determined to eliminate injustice.  Jesus came not to save sinners but to establish economic equality.  Thus Critical Race Theory (CRT) replaces repentance from sin with commitment to social change, primarily through politics.  CRT, Miles says, “is built upon a foundation of atheistic materialism” that “promotes varying moral standards based on the color of a person’s skin, instead of God’s righteous judgment” (p. 84). 

Miles devotes a chapter to the “school of woke,” tracing the secularization of Americ’s colleges and universities.  When Harvard College was founded its motto read:  Veritas pro Christo et Ecclesia, which means “Truth for Christ and Church.”  During the subsequent centuries the motto was changed to suit the spirit of the age and was recently chopped down to a simple Veritas.  As is well known, what happened to Harvard was replicated in the nation’s elite universities such as Princeton, Yale, and Columbia.  But Miles thinks the same process is happening again in “evangelical” schools such as Biola, Azusa Pacific, and Wheaton, which “are facing the exact same drift toward secularization, risking the loss of the few remaining trusted voices in American higher education” (p. 92).  Much the same can be said about the nation’s churches, some of which are more concerned with being Woke than proclaiming the Gospel.  Woke radicals (frequently funded by oligarchs such as George Soros) are clearly targeting the churches,, claiming to espouse a new and better morality.  Progressives to the bone, they frequently claim everything is relative, though in fact they are absolutists when it comes to items they favor, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, etc.  Whole posing as Christians they are actually promulgating a false religion, because as Scott David Allen says, the “social justice” they champion is truly “‘a culture of hatred, division, a false sense of moral superiority and a false understanding of justice. A culture where truth is replaced by power, and gratitude by ingratitude’” (p. 198).  

To rightly respond to these issues Miles sets forth rather simple, traditional means.  Serve God rather than man.  Root your faith in the fact that God became man to atone for our sins.  Make Scripture your authority.  Join a Bible-believing, doctrinally orthodox church.  Take care to know what your children are learning in school.  There’s a culture  war taking place and we must support the right side, taking our place in the church militant, both realistically assessing the situation and joyfully engaging in combat, confident we will triumph in the end.  

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As a university student Rosaria Butterfield found feminism a cause worth championing and lived for a decade as a lesbian activist, becoming a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University.  Then she met a gracious pastor of a Presbyterian church who lovingly prodded her to carefully consider who she was and how she was living.  In time she became a Christian, married a pastor, and has written fine books rooted in her story and new-found faith.  She recently published Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age (Wheaton, IL:  Crossway, c. 2023), primarily to give guidance for Christian women.  She has, Peter Jones (a friend of mine) says, “written a landmark book on there lies our culture is rapidly adopting regarding sexuality, what she calls ‘the idol of our time,’ namely LGBTQ+ ideology.”  Still more, he says:  “She offers profound, and deeply convincing, reflections on Christian spiritual issues of temptation, sin, envy, and modesty, as well as the doctrines of the Scriptures and ecclesiology.”  

Butterfield begins by saying:  “Seemingly overnight, a civil war within Christianity has broken out” (p. 1).  From her standpoint it’s a battle between good and evil, truth and lies.  The “world is in chaos, and the church is divided because we have failed to obey God and value his plan for how men and women should live” (p. 7).  The lies all too many Christians have embraced put them at odds with God, who clearly reveals Himself and His will in Scripture.  The lies giving structure to the book are:  1) homosexuality is normal and good—“the central and controlling narrative of our anti-Christian age;” 2) being a “kind” person is better than being a biblical disciple; 3) feminism is good for both society and the church; 4) transgenderism is good; 5) modesty is outdated and locks women into patriarchal domination.  For years, even for a while after becoming a Christian, Butterfield believed these lies.  But two Supreme Court decisions  forced her to change her positions.  In Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015, the court legalized same-sex marriage; in Bostoc vs. Clayton County, CA, 2020, it guaranteed civil rights for LGBTQ+ persons.  It was clear, in those decisions, that Sigmund Freud had replaced the Bible as our culture’s authority.  

Then Butterfield understood that Christians must boldly declare deeply traditional sexual standards and call everyone violating them to repent.  Though we must extend love to everyone, we dare not confuse acceptance with approval.  Accepting and extending grace to a lesbian daughter may establish a basis for building a good relationship.  But approving her behavior may well dissuade her from repentance and ultimately damn her soul.  Loving your gay son means doing what’s best for him and that includes refusing to attend his “gay wedding.”  If your 12 year old daughter wants to become a man you must do everything possible to prevent it.  These moral positions are, of course, anchored in Scripture and theology, so Butterfield seeks to explain how the Christian faith, by proclaiming the truth, is the answer all too many people in our world desperately need.  God designed our world and has given us clear instructions concerning how to live well.  This is particularly evident in ways men and women complement each other, a truth denied in anti-Christian lies.  And we must resolve to “live not by lies.”

In The Gift of With:  A Story of Finding the Life-Changing Wonders of the With-God Life (Thrive Media, c. 2024), Janelle McGuckin tells a wonderful story with three important dimensions:  being healed from cancer, coming to terms with her parents’ divorce, and discovering the reality of God’s presence.  By training a nurse, she writes with literary skill, particularly gifted in crafting the compelling figures-of-speech that mark a fine writer.  Successive chapters show how God was truly with her in struggles, isolation, disappointments, the unknown, life and death, emptiness, daily salvation, etc.  (Janelle was a student of mine at Point Loma Nazarene University and we have stayed in touch over the years, so I will refer to her by her first name—and also make clear I am understandably biased when evaluating her work!)

Janelle—an experienced nurse of 15 years with two little girls and a devoted husband—“a nurse who doesn’t know how to be a patient”—was, years ago, diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer and began a multi-year journey of repeated surgeries, radiation, recoveries, relapses, and ultimate healing.  Living in San Diego, she found solace in the silence of a bench overlooking the ocean, her “favorite place in the world.”  Her bench became an altar, “the only place I have found that makes my soul-aches feel tended.  I don’t need to bring anything except my noisy and weighted-down heart” (p. 13).  One day, at the beginning of her journey, she heard God speak.  “A gentle breeze blows and covers me, over my whole being, soft, very present, and very real.  He speaks; I write it down.  Every sweet, tender word.  He whispers three times, ‘I am with you, I am with you, I am with you’” (p. 13).  Those words set forth the book’s message—He is Emmanuel, the God who is ever with us.  

After her first surgery, requiring a a small incision on her neck, one of her daughters examined the scar and said:  “Well, it looks like you just have another happy face.”  Minutes later she and her sister “came back in with cherry red Mr. Sketch marker scars across the front of their own necks to match my new happy face” (p. 18).  Overwhelmed by their empathy, Janelle found the Lord comforting her in the midst of her discomfort.  But the cancer returned, necessitating not only surgery but a dose of nuclear medicine so powerful that she had to stay alone in a hotel room for a week lest others be adversely impacted by the radiation.  Though the “effects of the nuclear waste in my body” were innervating, she found herself basking “in a peace which I cannot explain” (p. 25).  Listening to music, reading, soaking in the sunsets, she found real peace in the midst of the storm.  “I am, as incredible as it sounds, abiding with Him (The Vine), and I (The Branch) in this waiting place undergoing pruning to eventually become more fruitful” (p. 26).  

Battling cancer challenged her faith as well as her body.  She’d asked Jesus into her heart when she was four years old and naturally imagined her life would consequently be much like living in the Garden of Eden.  And her childhood was truly idyllic, anchored in her parents’ active involvement in church.  She “was one of those lucky girls who grew up with a dad who adored her” and provided the security every child desires.  Then her grandmother, the matriarch of the family, died unexpectedly.  Her world was no longer perfect!  When her brother impregnated his girlfriend, some folks in the church began to shun the family, so they stopped attending church.  Her mother began dealing with abuse she had suffered as a child and her father became increasingly obsessed with his business and golf tournaments.  By the time she left for college (Point Loma Nazarene University) she knew her childhood Eden was gone.  Reading Scott Peck’s declaration that “life is difficult” helped her acknowledge a “simple truth” she needed to embrace as she watched her parents divorce after her mother packed a small bag and walked away from her home.  Fortunately, though she discovered her father’s “dark side,” they stayed in constant contact and the relationship healed before he died.  “God really does bring beauty from ashes” (p. 111).  She and her mother would also finally reconcile as she is restored to health by the Holy Spirit after 20 years of turning away from her faith.  

Janelle maintained a busy schedule at college, doing the hard work demanded for a nursing major, but because of her parents’ problems much of her life was blurred by concern for them.  “Disappointment and confusion ran deep about who my parents were, what they’d taught me, and what they now believed” (p. 36).   Sadly enough:  “The ripple effects of divorce never fully resolve or go away until the other side of heaven” (p. 39).  Fortunately, her boyfriend Scott (who would become her husband) was a rock giving solidity to her life.  He too had some transformative moments with God.  Attending a men’s retreat in Colorado, he followed a suggestion and asked the LORD to give him a special name, which He did.  Janelle then wondered if she could also receive a name, and she heard a whispered word—Delight.  Minutes later she picked up a book quoting these words from Zephaniah 3:17:  “The Lord your God is with you; He is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”  The “with us” God was truly with her in her deepest moments of need.  

After recovering from her first bout with cancer in San Diego, Janelle and family moved back to northern California, where the disease resumed its assault.  “Project happy-face expansion gets underway with my Divine Surgeon and Chief Branch Pruner” (p. 59).  She finds another bench, this time on a small lake, that serves as her altar.  Living in total isolation while the radiation seeks out the invasive tumors, she finds strength in music and prayer.  Somehow in the midst of utter weakness she finds strength to carry on.  “All I can say is He is real and personal” (p. 66).  She deals not only with her physical ills but with spiritual issues that push her to ever-deeper levels of surrender and trust.  Waiting on God is a “daily salvation experience.”  Another hope-fulled remission was followed by yet another series of treatments.  But God stayed with her.  “When I embrace the with-God life, fear fades.  I soak in the most repeated command written 70 times in the Bible, ‘Do not be afraid.’  Fear is losing its grip” (p. 81).  

After the third series of treatments the long wait begins again.  This time however, lab tests come back good!  In fact, they were miraculous.  The doctors had predicted that she would have to get treatments the rest of her life, but suddenly her cancer is “‘non-detectable.’  Non-detectable means the number is zero—a number I haven’t seen in four years” (p. 81).  Rejoicing in the good news prodded Janelle to even deeper spiritual surgery, wanting to be all God desired her to be, totally surrendered to His Will, transformed by His Grace.   She then talked with a gifted counselor, found space in monastic retreats, and read good books as well as meditating on Scripture.  She discovered the worth of truly observing the Sabbath.  Finally she found that there really is an Eden—living in accord with God’s design.  Therein are:  “Trees of green.  Giving trees that speak of the best Gift-giver.  Until we get there, I hope you’ll keep looking for benches with me and clinging to the only gift that provides a taste of eternity here and now—His Presence, His with-ness.  Him with-in, and with us.   Always” (p. 115).  

Though Janelle has probably not read St Teresa de Avila or St John of the Cross, her experiences remind me the insights set forth by these classic mystical writers.  Deeply influenced by them, T.S. Eliot penned words in The Four Quartets aptly describing Janelle’s discoveries:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.  

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Another friend of mine, Kay Harkins, has written a deeply probing book,  Queen of the Leaves:  A Memoir of Lost and Found (New York:  Austin Macauley Publishers, c. 2020; Kindle Edition).  Born in Des Moines, Iowa, to a Catholic father and a mother who converted to appease him, Kay early pondered religious subjects while attending a Catholic school. She was encouraged by her father’s loving mother (Grandma Helen) to engage in devotional practices.   “Somewhere between the incantations of Latin, Sister Miriam’s story time, and the black and white Life of Christ films at St. Theresa’s School, I began to expect an immediate return of Jesus Christ” (p. 8).  “‘What’s keeping Jesus?’” became a question I would alternately abandon and reconsider for the rest of my life” as she would journey from “the elegant and European disciplines of Catholicism to the wider Protestant frontier [including years in the Church of the Nazarene], and finally to Eastern Orthodox Christianity” (p. 43).  Her early piety was, however, jolted when her father left his family when Kay was six years old.  Telling Kay the bad news, her mother hugged her and said:  “‘Daddy doesn’t love us anymore, honey.  He’s going away to live with another lady.’”  A little girl’s world shattered.  The room “began to spin.  I wanted her not to have said, ‘Doesn’t love us.’  A mother wouldn’t say that to a child, would she?  But she didn’t say ‘doesn’t love me,’ she said ‘doesn’t love US.’  In some ways, she was right, in some ways, she was wrong, but she said those words” (p. 18).

Betrayed by her father, Kay sought solace in her inner life, spending much time alone.  One day, rolling in leaves on the lawn, she felt herself a part of something bigger than herself—being immersed in Love—and:  “I thought I felt, not only the love of God, but somehow being part of that love. ‘I’m the Queen of the Leaves,’ I said out loud. . . . .  I thought about being the good and loving queen of all I surveyed.  I cannot recall how long I lay in the leaves that day.  But I know that I have found myself returning to that bank and the outpouring of love I sensed there when times of pain, sorrow or uncertainty have overwhelmed me. . . . .  On that day I learned to love silence as much as I loved music, to seek it in nature, a library, or a quiet room in times of turmoil and confusion.  It was a lesson that would serve me well in the coming years” (p. 22).  

If seeing her father depart was difficult, getting a step-father was worse!  Her father made a deal—escaping child support payments by giving her step-father the right to adopt Kay and her sister!  The new stepfather lived in Texas, so that required a move as well as related disruptions, but “the big gamble” her mother made failed.  He turned out to be a “captor” rather than a savior, treating the girls like a drill-sergeant and making the mother a housekeeper who also had to work full-time.  “To an outsider, he appeared completely charming.”  He made a good living and his “public persona was impeccable, as were the environs of our home:  manicured lawn, shiny washed cars, and a house that was cleaned top to bottom weekly by his daughters” (p. 60).  But his darkest side was exposed when he sexually abused his daughters, inflicting wounds it would take a lifetime to heal.  

Successfully negotiating high school, Kay proved to be a talented musician who received a  music scholarship to Texas Tech University.  Then mutual friends introduced her to Jack Harkins, who was both athletic and intelligent.  A straight A student in high school, he found classes uninteresting and dropped out in his junior year, joined the Marines and served with distinction in Vietnam, receiving purple hearts and promotions in the process.  Their courtship commenced and one day “a voice in my head said, ‘Don’t let this man get away!’”  Though she was still working and sporadically going to school, “we began to swim for the rock of marriage against the tide of all that might seem against us in that turbulent time” (p. 100). 

As a military wife, Kay moved with Jack as he served in various assignments and gave birth to two children.  Early on, she tended to make him the focus of all her attention, but in time it became clear that she could not make him her god.  During their time in Hawaii, she was “the seventies’ Earth Mother, baking my own bread, making my own yogurt, sprouting my own sprouts, taking dance classes, and volunteering at the base hospital” (p. 105).  Financial realities also pushed her to finds various forms of employment but she always longed to settle near a university where she could at last complete her education.  She also managed to re-connect with her birth father, who turned out to be charming and anxious to repair their broken ties.  Increasingly, she also found herself more deeply embedded in the reality of her Heavenly Father.  “We are held in the infinite love and grace of the God,” she says, “seen and unseen, who is always there ahead of us, always immediately with us, when we have the awareness to notice.  The picture can only be borne for a few seconds, but it is enough to hold me” (p. 136). 

Queen of the Leaves is a well-crafted, insightful memoir, telling the story of what many would consider an “ordinary” woman.  But Kay is a woman who writes with extraordinary skill, telling a riveting story most worth reading.  There’’s a great deal of pain and failure packed into her memoir, but it’s truly another illustration of “beauty from ashes.”

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Years ago I read and reviewed Sally Read’s Night’s Bright Darkness:  A Modern Conversion Story (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2016).  The author, a contemporary English poet, was reared in a militantly atheist home—her father a vociferous Marxist journalist—who at ten “could tell you that religion was the opiate of the masses” and that “Christians, in particular, were tambourine-bashing intellectual weaklings.”  Only matter exists, so neither God nor the soul matter.  Yet when she began working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital she met patients whose sufferings and dyings gave her pause.  Still more:  amidst the intemperate drinking and casual sex that punctuated her work-week routine, she occasionally felt strangely drawn to old churches in the neighborhood.  Then her father’s death at the age of fifty-six devastated her.  “I felt as if a god had died.  The creator of my world and my protector had gone” (#231).  The standard cliches and quasi-scientific theories shaping the modern world proved illusive.                       

Abandoned and inwardly empty, she felt as if she were in hell and wondered what, indeed, life is all about.  She “even considered, in a desperate and vague way, invoking God.”  Perhaps some kind of faith would make life “liveable.  But it seemed entirely unfeasible to believe in any God; I thought I could never lower myself to that degree of self-delusion” (#246).   Looking back, she now considers that desolate phase of her life a blessing, for God was mysteriously working therein to bring her to Himself.  “His absence was so painfully loud it seems, now, to prove his existence,” for He “reaches us wherever we are, even if we are so far from knowing him that we mistake him completely.  His infinity always contains our finitude” (#253).  She became a published poet, married and had a little girl—something that pushed her to ponder metaphysical questions.  Events and relationships with some Catholic women who enjoyed a rich devotional life encouraged her to loosen her secular shackles.  So she began visiting churches and got acquainted with a godly Ukrainian studying for the priesthood whose gentle counsel and literary references help nudge her to faith.  He encouraged her to pray, though she had no idea how.  Then she picked up T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and sensed almost immediately an inner peace, an acceptance of a Reality that unleashed a torrent of tears.  Entering a nearby church she felt:  “The strange calm that had come upon me that night the week before had settled into a new longing to know what to do.”  Looking up, she saw an icon of Christ’s face in a window and said:  “‘If you’re there, you have to help me’” (#650). And He did!  “I felt almost physically lifted up.  My eyes began crying instantly, my face relaxed.  It was like being in the grip of panicked amnesia, when suddenly someone familiar walked into the room and gave myself back to me—a self restored to me more fully than before.  It was a presence entirely fixed me as I was on it, and it both descended toward me and pulled me up.  I knew it was him.  This was the hinge of my life; this compassion and love and humility so great it buckled me as it came to meet me (#658).                  

Thenceforth she frequently prayed, reciting the Our Father, knowing she was safe in His arms and feeling “as if the Birth, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection were plunged into my being in one gorgeous blow—this is how it is to all of a sudden know the meaning of reality:  the heart kick-started to sense its intrinsic architecture of logic, love, and reason” (#658).  She inwardly sensed the Presence of the Living Lord.  “There was a feeling of being known in every cell.  My aloneness was taken away from me; and though it has often since returned, I know that loneliness is the illusion and Christ beside me the reality.  This was my earliest prayer:  being attuned to Christ’s presence, which by grace I perceived in those early days as strongly was my daughter’s breathing or the sound of the blackbird singing at night in the garden.  Prayer became essential,” and she sensed “being touched—if so pale a word can describe the sensation of being broken and healed—touched that he had come to me when I had rejected him and spoken against him and published lies about him in my books” (#680).  Then she began reading the Gospels and found the Jesus revealed therein quite unlike the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” proclaimed in liberal churches.  She came to see that the Truth was something given to us, not something we fashion,.  It was firmly established and preserved in the Church of the Apostles.  And the Truth she encountered led her, step by step into the Catholic Church.  Night’s Bright Darkness reveals a poet determined to discern and beautifully describe Reality in all its fullness.     Rather recently Sally Read published Annunciation:  A Call to Faith in a Broken World (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2019; Kindle Edition).   Pondering her daughter’s birth led her to consider Mary’s Annunciation—an event that provides “the possibility of Christ in our lives or the bleakness of a world without him.”  She says:  “The Annunciation was a part of my own consciousness long before I believed in God—even then I recognized it as a pivotal encounter.”  Writing this book for her daughter, she “saw how those few lines of Luke contain everything of my own relationship with God, and most phases of the spiritual life.”  So she wrote Annunciation as “a meditation on the universal close and remote dance with God” that was “written by a mother lovingly guiding a daughter,” hoping it “will speak to anyone who has felt pain or experienced doubt, or indeed those who know well the mystery and bliss of faith.  The Annunciation is an invitation to a deeper relationship with God for each and every one of us” (p. 13).   So she moves slowly through Luke’s account, applying words spoken to Mary to her own child.  Gazing at her little girl, she wrote:  “your heart is a vast and quite frightening thing.  It was designed for God, and so, like a vertiginous and beautifully carved stone cathedral, it cries out to be filled with a voice, with love; it aches to be animated by a Spirit large enough” (p. 25).  Anticipating that her daughter will read the book when she is grown up, Read cites the angel’s words to Mary (“do not be afraid”) she hopes her little one will “remember how many times I told you as a child, ‘Do not be afraid’?  That, and ‘Don’t worry’ and “I love you.’  Sometimes they are interchangeable. ‘I love you,’ I will say before the math test, meaning ‘Do not be afraid.’  ‘What if I fail?’ you say.  And I answer, ‘Don’t worry.’  God tells us not to be afraid repeatedly through Scripture (Dan 10:12; Is 41:10; 1 Jn 4:18) and continues to tell us so through private revelation (Julian of Norwich, Saint Faustina).  If, for mothers, “Do not be afraid” is another way of saying “I love you”, it has to be much the same way with God” (p. 33).  Given courage to conquer fear, Mary was able to accept her calling—to be a “handmaid of the Lord.” We all struggle to discover “who we are.”  The answer for Mary was to be a mother—the mother of God’s Son incarnate in Jesus.  We too find ourselves when we totally surrender to God and His will, and prayerful openness “the light of his gaze will give you coherence and some understanding of the person you really are.  This sense of yourself is far from the modern notion of discovering your ‘identity’.  It is a glimpse into the mystery of your soul in creation” (p. 57).  In Christ we find who we are and ought to be, and in Him we find peace and joy beyond measure.  That’s what Sally Read has found, and we’re grateful.

Unlike typical introductory textbooks, Peter Kreeft’s Ethics for Beginners:  52 “Big Ideas” from 32 Great Minds (South Bend:  Indiana:  St. Augustine’s Press, c. 2019) focuses on the “big ideas” mulled over by the greatest thinkers in human history.  The 52 questions ultimately collapse into three really big ones.  First, we wonder what’s the “greatest good” or “ultimate end” or “meaning in life”—what’s really, really good, the “summun bonum.”  Secondly, we want to know what kind of persons we should be in order to live ethically, virtuously.  As Socrates said, “a good person does not worry much about whether he lives or dies, but only about the one big thing:  whether he is a good person or a bad one” (p. 8).  Thirdly, how should we treat others?  How do we fulfill the second of Jesus’ great commandments, loving others as we love ourselves.  

Notably absent in Kreeft’s list of great ethicists are his contemporaries.  He takes a dim view of current conditions, sharing Albert Camus’ evaluation of modern men—“they fornicated and read the newspapers.”  But the pre-modern world nourished philosophers who sought to know what’s right and wrong within a coherent metaphysical (or theological) perspective.  They looked to the wisdom of the past for direction and never imagined, as would Nietzsche (an architect of modern thought), of “creating a wholly new moral system, a ‘transvaluation of values, as he called it, in which arbitrariness, self-indulgence,  egotism, cruelty, injustice, force, deliberate lying, and arrogant, sneering superiority were virtues, while wisdom, self-control, altruism, kindness, justice, reason, honesty, and humility were vices” (p. 23).  Though some of the ancient and medieval thinkers were fideists, hedonists, emotivists, or deontologists, most of them were teleologists.  They believed there were logical ends, reasons for right behavior.  And their names are impressive—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas to name the finest.  

We cannot avoid thinking about ethics!  Day-by-day we make decisions in accord with our ethical (or moral) views.  So history gives us wonderful sources to consult while doing so.  Kreeft devotes insightful chapters to ethicists in Asia such as Confucius and the Buddha.  He also notes the importance of Moses as the lawgiver whose 10 Commandments are one of the most important ethical compilations ever recorded.  Following him, “The Jews are God’s collective prophet to the world, His reminder of what everyone innately knows is His will:  Be Good!” (p. 42).  The Jewish tradition was elevated by Jesus, who declared “Agape as the Heart of Ethics” (p. 44).  Thus Christians believe “that (1) the meaning of life, the summum bonum, and the nature of ultimate reality is Jesus; and (2) the truly human being is Jesus; and (3) the way to live and treat others is Jesus’s way” (p. 44).  

Nourishing the Judeo-Christian ethical perspective, ancient Greeks provided enduring insights.  First came Socrates.  “No philosopher in history has ever made more of a difference than Socrates.  No one ever changed the face of philosophy more” (p. 51).  He was, above all, an ethicist.  And also a logician!  To know the truth and follow it, to be a lover of wisdom as well as a clear thinker, defined him.  His student, Plato, systematized his master’s thought, setting forth a “theory of forms” which enabled him to justify “the objective reality of moral values, as the basis for what was later called an unchanging and objectively real ‘natural moral law’ in opposition to the Sophists, who were moral relativists and subjectivists” (p. 58).  His “forms” quite akin to ideas in the Mind of God.  To Plato, there “are the ‘natural laws’ (logos) that all things obey.  E.G., ‘If you are unjust you will be unhappy, for justice is to the soul what health is to the body’—which is the main point and conclusion of the Republic.  They are not invented, they are discovered, in ‘the nature of things’” (p. 59).  Plato’s student, Aristotle, both embraced and modified many of his views.  Both insisted that to be happy you must be good, living virtuously.  But Aristotle was more down-to-earth, working out a “common sense” ethics rooted in the “golden mean.”  What’s good is usually avoiding extremes, walking a balanced life in the center of the road.  “Nothing too much” typified his approach.  Though other philosophers in the ancient world merit mention, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—absolutists all who advocated a “natural law” morality— “were perhaps the three greatest philosophers who ever lived” (p. 71) and merit sustained attention.

Equally important for Kreeft are three medieval saints:  Augustine; Anselm; Aquinas.  They generally embraced the positions of the ancient Greeks but made love for God and neighbor the basic principles of their ethics.  They saw no conflict between faith and reason and looked to Revelation as well as human wisdom for guidance in life:  “For God is the author of both human reason, which He designed as part of ‘the image of God’ in man, and of faith—i.e., the Faith, what He revealed.  This is the mainline answer of medieval thinkers, especially Augustine and Aquinas” (p. 76).  Aquinas, importantly, emphasized four kinds of law:  eternal; natural; divine; human.  And he explained why the seven foundational virtues (wisdom; courage; moderation; justice; faith; home; charity) blend the four “cardinal” and three “supernatural” virtues that constitute the ethical life.  (Kreeft has published several books on Aquinas and it’s clear that for him the “angelic doctor” is The Philosopher.)

Moving from the medieval to the modern era, we encounter influential thinkers, architects of the Enlightenment, who no longer looked to religion for moral guidance.  So there is Machiavelli (called “the Devil’s son” by some) declaring that “the end justifies the means.”  Akin to Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes thought only the material world exists.  Consequently:  “Man is nothing but body, mind is nothing but brain, truth is nothing but picturing, and goodness is nothing but the power to get what satisfies our desires” (p. 76).  Then Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment, making “feelings” the best guides for ethics.  Though different in most respects, the English empiricist David Hume actually agreed with Rousseau in making morality “a matter of feeling and subjective desire.  And [Kreeft declares] this is the single most popular ethical philosophy in modern Western culture.  In fact it is probably this idea, more than any other, that most radically distinguishes our culture from all others in the history of the world” (p. 76).  So, in the words of Shakespeare’s Polonius (a character in Hamlet), “There is nothing right or wrong, but thinking makes it so.”  

Au contraire!  Nothing could be more wrong than following your feelings, said Immanuel Kant, advocating “a non-metaphysical moral absolutism” rooted in human reason.  To be good is to do your duty, acting as you think everyone ought to act.  Just as we understand the world in accord with our mental “categories,” so too we know what’s right by consulting our own conscience, which gives us a “categorical imperative.”  You must do what’s right, without regard for consequences.  Yet John Stuart Mill and the utilitarians disagreed, saying only consequences matter!  “The greatest good for the greatest number” is a utilitarian motto widely accepted by many Americans, including our many of our political and judicial leaders.  

During the past two centuries other ethicists deserve mention.  There were existentialists (Kierkegaard; Nietzsche; Sartre), Christian personalists (Gabriel Marcel; Dietrich von Hildebrand), and analytic philosophers (A.J. Ayer; G.E. Moore; Ludwig Wittgenstein).  Finally, and rather importantly, Kreeft notes the significance of Alasdair MacIntyre, who moved from atheism to Catholicism, from Marxism to Thomism, ultimately despairing at the catastrophic triumph of barbarism in our culture.  “‘We possess indeed some simulacra of morality,’” he lamented, “‘we continue to use many of the key expressions.  But we have very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality’” (p. 135).  Though Kreeft hopes a sunnier view, replicating that of Aquinas, will emerge, he ends his treatise significantly agreeing with MacIntyre.  Illustrating this is “the historically unprecedented radical, sudden, and nearly total change in public opinion concerning homosexuality and same sex marriage” (p. 134).  We are, in many ways, living in the “The Wasteland” T.S. Eliot explored a century ago.

Ethics for Beginners is short and interesting, a book clearly designed to appeal to thoughtful folks without much background in philosophy.  But it also helps those of us professors who have devoted many hours to the subject to reflect on the elementary but essential truths we need to live by.  

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Half-a-century ago universities offered courses and majors that no longer exist.  In many schools, for example, students can no longer major in classics or philosophy—and English majors know no Shakespeare!  Revered disciplines have disappeared!  One of the world’s premier ethicists, Oliver O’Donovan, fears the same will happen to his discipline.   Indeed, some elite universities have “filled chairs of moral philosophy with economics” (p. 7).  So he wrote a scholarly treatise entitled The Disappearance of Ethics:  The 2022 St. Andrews Gifford Lectures (Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing, c. 2024).  Launched in 1887, the Gifford Lectures, devoted to natural theology,  have featured highly distinguished thinkers—including William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Karl Barth.  O’Donovan is considered one of the world’s premier Christian ethicists, so his appraisal of his discipline merits attention, though his prose requires considerable patience and acuity.  (His lectures are obviously designed more for professors than beginners in philosophy!). He doesn’t think we will cease thinking about and making ethical decisions.  But he fears there will no longer be an intellectual discipline devoted to the subject.  He believes:  “Morality unsupported by argument loses its authority; moral argument without sufficient base in reasoned reflection loses its conviction.  Ethics defends the reflection that makes moral reasoning fruitful and moral practice credible.  A society without ethics is exposed by the poverty of its moral vocabulary and the rigidity of its moral arguments to the destructive forces of conflict and loss of tradition” (p. 8).  

O’Donovan endeavors to explain what’s happened and then propose finding a solution in distinctively Christian Ethics.  To discover what’s Good and to devise ways to implement it have ever been ethicists’ calling:  “Practical reason succeeds in its task when it grasps some real good, some possibility of fulfillment and realization implicit in the real world, that can be made explicit” (p. 18).  Such reason functions well when rooted in a “moral realism” that finds both creation and human conscience attuned to a deep fountain of ethical principles.  Moral realism, rightly framed, can inform the modern mind, which for various reasons (think Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche) tends to reduce morality to personal preferences.  To find a better way leads us back to “the mainstream of Catholic Christianity, fed by the Gospels and Christians antiquity,” best summed up by “the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth about the ‘heart,’ the moral subject from which all explicit performances, good or evil, sprang” (p.68).  

Thus, as St Paul wrote, “Christ is the end of the law” (Rom 10:4).  “Ethics must point to Christ and cry, ‘Ecco homo!’” (p. 135).  Following Him, listening to His Spirit, enables Christians to live rightly.  We’re to cooperate with Him, doing His work in our world.  We’re not God and He ultimately rules, but we are privileged to give ourselves to Him and His Kingdom.  “So let us speak . . . of a cooperative agency of God and man in shaping history.  The Creator acts and the creature acts, though with unequal initiative; they are aligned in pursuit of purposes that are common to both” (p. 147).  Thus theology provides the foundation for ethics.  To prevent the disappearance of ethics in the academy requires the revival of Christianity in society.

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Two evangelical philosophers, David A. Horner and J.P. Moreland, professors at BIOLA University, have co-authored Metaethics:  A Short Companion (Brentwood, TN:  B&H Academic, c. 2024).  Horner is no doubt the primary author, while the more renowned Moreland joined him in finalizing the project, writing a text for teachers and well-grounded college students.  “Ethics as discipleship is a key theme throughout Scripture,” say Ben Mitchell and Jason Thacker in the book’s preface, “and one the church must elevate as we seek God’s face in then academy, in our churches, and especially in our personal lives as transformed creatures made in the very image of God” (p. 18).  “Metaethics” (a term used only by academic philosophers) refers to basic questions such as:  “Is morality something grounded in the nature of things, or is it a human construction?   Are moral values objective, or are they relative to different individuals or cultures?  Does morality depend on God, and if so, how?”  Big questions!  Questions deserving serious thought!  The authors identify four crucial metaethical questions:  “(1) questions about what exists (moral metaphysics), (2) questions about language (moral semantics), (3) questions about mental states (moral psychology), and (4) questions about knowledge and justification (moral epistemology).” 

The book begins by citing an essay by Joel Marks, a professor who taught moral philosophy for many years only to conclude there’s actually “no morality!”  He was  teaching a subject which had no content!  Indeed, if nothing’s right or wrong what’s to teach?  Technically his position is called Nihilism.  Marks “describes his loss of faith in morality as an outgrowth of his atheism:  ‘I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God.  We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period.  But this was a God too.  It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander.’”  As Dostoevsky’s character Ivan, in Brothers Karamazov famously said:  “If God does not exist, anything is permissible.”  Professor Marks, it seems, “is far from alone among philosophers in holding these sorts of metaethical views, though he’s more explicit than many in identifying their worldview connections.”  

To know what’s right and wrong one must find something firm and Very Real  beyond personal preferences or societal perspectives.  So throughout history various forms of philosophical realism—assuming there are realities apart from our minds that we can know—have thrived.  It’s a common sense view that millions of folks simply assume.  To G.K. Chesterton, “the consensus of ideas and values and practices that prevails over generations and centuries reflects a collective vote of confidence—a ‘democracy of the dead’—that cries out to be acknowledged.”  Common Sense Realists such as Aristotle tell “‘us to follow the appearances.  It directs us to think that things really are as they seem, that appearances match reality—until we have excellent reason for doubt.’”  Given this tradition, “Metaethicists of all stripes appeal to the phenomenology of moral experience:  the way we experience morality, as reflected in our moral intuitions, concepts, language, and behavior—our common moral experience.”  

A subset of philosophical realism—moral realism—claims “that some things are right and some things are wrong (or good or bad), regardless of people’s beliefs, preferences, or attitudes regarding them.”  There is a solid link between what one thinks and what IS.  In the physical world there’s the second law of thermodynamics that explains why things decay.  There are also, in the metaphysical world, laws of morality that we can understand and should heed.  These moral truths are objective, rooted in a Reality apart from us.  Thus we know it’s wrong to torture children and right to be kind.  Doing so we cannot but think about “the nature, status grounding, underlying presuppositions, and philosophical commitments of morality itself.”  We cannot help searching for metaethical truths linked to enduring realities.  “In more technical terms, moral realists understand moral judgments to be propositions or truth-claims, statements that are ‘truth-apt’( capable being true or false), whose actual truth or falsity depends.  On their correspondence to reality, which, in turn, is an objective matter, no more dependent on human opinion, preference, or endorsement than the law of gravity.”  

Despite its distinguished pedigree, moral realism has been discarded by many ethicists.  From the 18th century onward various forms of subjective morality have flourished.  David Hume, a naturalistic thinker who believed only empirical details could be known, concluded we have moral sentiments that are nothing more than that—sentiments that shift with the times and situations.  For him, “morality is about the feelings and sentiments one experiences, and these are entirely nonrational, noncognitive, and contingent matters.”  As he declared:  “Reason is, and ought only be be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”  Follow your feelings, wherever they lead you!  Hume most probably was a full-fledged atheist, though he avoided the label.  But his ethical views are generally shared by thinkers who think the material world is all there is.  Thus A.J. Ayer, a leader of the logical positivist school in the first half of the 20th century, set forth an “emotivist” explanation for ethical standards.  If you feel murder is wrong it is, but if think it’s just OK then it is!  

Another naturalistic alternative to moral realism is “moral constructivism.”  Pivotal thinkers forging modernity are Francis Bacon (and his intellectual heir Karl Marx) who wanted to reshape the world rather than understand it.  Even Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential modern philosophers, was a constructivist, Horner thinks, since he declared that ethical principles are discerned within our own minds rather than in any objective world beyond them.  To constructivists, what we think in our minds can take form in the world, transforming it for our own ends.  They are relativists inasmuch as there are no eternally valid ethical truths.  “What all forms of constructivism share,” Horner and Moreland say, “is the conviction that moral status is conferred by us as human subjects—by our psychological or volitional activity of falling, prescribing, endorsing and the like.”  Years ago I read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and subsequently re-read it, finding it quite informative and confirmed by own experience.  He began the book thusly:  “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of:  almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.  If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the student’s reaction:  they will be uncomprehending.  That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes the, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4.  These are things you don’t think about.”  There are certainly things that are right and wrong—but they vary with the situation.  Slavery can be fine in one era but wrong in another.  Child sacrifice may—or not be—right.  It all depends!  Whatever society approves is right.   

Recurrently, throughout Metaethics, Horner and Moreland stress the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism.  “Naturalism is the chief worldview rival to Christianity and other forms of theism today and is the chief motivation behind antirealist metaethical theories.”  For the past century in America, philosophical naturalism has ruled, especially when thinkers take “evolution through natural selection” as their guide.  To illustrate, William Provine, a professsor of biological sciences at Cornell University, said:  “There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind.  There is no life after death.  When I die, I’m absolutely certain that I aim going to be dead.  That’s the end for me.  There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.”  In short:  everything can be reduced to atoms-in-motion flowing through space, making the world as it is.  Though not all ethical naturalists are as straightforward as Provine, none of them find any transcendent, non-material source for ethical norms.  “As Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga puts it, ‘[Naturalism’s] Achilles’ Heel (in addition to its deplorable falsehood) is that it has no room, for normatively.  There is no room, within naturalism, for right or wrong or good or bad.’”

After finding ethical naturalism inadequate, the authors take us back to moral realism as the only sound metaethical view.  There are good reasons for living a moral life, reasons embedded in the very fabric of Reality.  Living rightly—following the rules set forth by God and His Law—is good for us as persons and for our society as well.  God is Good and doing His will, following the truths revealed in creation and scripture, is good for us. 

Reading Scripture and Church history reminds us that all human institutions can be easily corrupted.  Sadly enough the Christian clergy for 2000 years have a spotty (if not sorry) record in this respect.  “In 1983,” says Megan Basham, “theologian Francis Schaeffer grew alarmed by evangelical groups concerning themselves with fashionable issues like ‘unjust structures’ and inequitable wealth distribution rather than sinful human hearts.  He had no doubt he was seeing capitulation to the spirit of the age.  And he had no doubt where such socialist, utopian thinking would lead:  ‘Here the gospel has been reduced to a program for transforming social structures.  This is the Marxist line.  It does not mean that those who take this position are Communists.  But it does mean they have made a complete confusion of the kingdom of God with the basic socialistic concepts’” (p. xxv).  

Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale:  How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2024; Kindle Edition) takes a careful look at the evangelical world and shows how its leaders have all too frequently followed the spirit of the age Schaeffer denounced.  In the book’s epigraph she cites J. Gresham Machen, who said (in Christianity and Liberalism):  “Presenting an issue sharply is indeed by no means a popular business at the present time.”  Defining terms carefully and following logic is too often “regarded as an impious proceeding.”  But, Machen insisted:  “Light may seem at times to be an impertinent intruder, but it is always beneficial in the end.  The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from ‘controversial’ matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life.  In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”  So Basham is ready to fight—and at times turns polemical.  Consequently her book has elicited anguished cries from some of the individuals and ministries she assails, but she surely cites considerable evidence that should alarm us.  

As a journalist Basham combines anecdotes with sociological data and theological concerns.  As a Southern Baptist she tends to focus on America’s largest Protestant denomination (to be precise, a “convention”) and sides with Joy Davidman (C.S. Lewis’s wife), saying:  “mustn’t the churches adapt Christianity to suit the ideas of our time?  No, they must not.  Our ideas are killing us spiritually.  When your child swallows poison, you don’t sit around thinking of ways to adapt his constitution to a poisonous diet. You give him an emetic.”  Basham interviewed dozens of people who “are ordinary Christians who feel confused and dismayed to see well-known pastors and ministry leaders letting the culture rather than Scripture dictate the content of their teaching.  They see leaders insisting that Jesus requires them to get Covid-19 vaccinations and lobby for immigration bills, but doesn’t require them to speak clearly about sexual morality.  They feel, frankly, like sheep without shepherds” (p. xv).

They feel this because many of their churches have been taken over by leftists (generally identifying themselves as “progressives”) determined to redirect their priorities.  As soon as the Bolsheviks gained control of Russia a century ago they plotted a similar take-over in America.  They planted agents in mainline Protestant churches to promote socialism under the banner of “social justice.”  They considered America’s clergy “suckers” easily duped to advance the communist cause.   Amazingly, an estimated 20 percent of Episcopalian rectors were “associated with communist activities” (p. xvii).   Basham wants us to remember this history as we read her book.  “You will see eerily similar parallels to events happening today.  Secular, leftist organizations that have no interest in furthering God’s kingdom or seeing biblical morality enacted in the public square are funneling money into front groups with names like the “Evangelical Environmental Network” and the “Evangelical Immigration Table.”  Well-known evangelical leaders, posing as representatives of average Christians in the pews, are once again publishing open letters in national newspapers on behalf of leftist causes” (p. xviii).  Secular leftists know that large numbers of voters opposing them are evangelical Christians.  To advance their agenda—e.g. climate change, LGBTQ rights, illegal immigration—leftists need to gain influence in these conservative churches.  

Climate alarmism stands at the heart of the progressive agenda, though Evangelicals have shown little alarm at it.  Given their biblical worldview, however, some can be enlisted in “creation care.”  Thus the Evangelical Environmental Network came into being 30 years ago with a “mission:  to win average churchgoers to the green cause by leveraging the influence of trusted institutions like Christianity Today and the National Association of Evangelicals” (p. 5).  Targeting the educated elites in evangelicalism—university professors, denominational leaders, Christian publications—the EEN worked to make environmental concern a moral issue.  A bumper sticker asking not “what would Jesus do” but “What Would Jesus Drive” gained momentary attention, leading Jay Leno to quip “that Jesus would have driven a dented-up pickup—he was a carpenter, after all’” (p. 8).  A decade after its founding the “EEN received an influx of cash from left-wing donors that allowed it to found a new, more aggressive front organization.  One of the funders was the Clinton Global Initiative—yes, those Clintons—which kicked in five hundred thousand dollars” (p. 9).  The Hewlett Foundation donated another half-million.  Subsequently the Evangelical Climate Initiative was launched and gained considerable publicity as well as enhanced renown for lobbyists such as Richard Cizik, who served as a vice president for the National Association of Evangelicals.  Supporting the initiative were “various Christianity Today editors and writers,” Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, the presidents of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and World Vision.  

Strangely absent from the list of the initiative’s signers were actual climate scientists such as Professor Cal Beisner, who has devoted a lifetime to studying climate change and established the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation which includes NASA climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer and environmental economist Dr. Ross McKitrick.   They drafted a deeply sourced response to the EEN, providing a “detailed, relevant research.”  They “did not deny that global warming was occurring.  But the Cornwall Alliance demonstrated how much uncertainty remained about the degree to which it was human-induced, and they denied that it was an extreme problem requiring an extreme solution,  “’Foreseeable global warming will have moderate and mixed (not only harmful but also helpful), not catastrophic, consequences for humanity—including the poor—and the rest of the world’s inhabitants,’ they wrote.”  Certainly Christians should be good stewards and love their neighbors, but the alliance signers rejected the assertion that believers should be “spiritually guilted into” supporting government programs such as the green new deal (p. 24).  To Basham:  “What we see is that from the earliest stages of the creation care movement, it has never been simply an effort to encourage personal righteousness or reflection on how individual Christians might steward the earth responsibly or practice conservation in our own spheres of influence” (p. 24).  It is, quite simply, an effort to enlist Evangelicals in a leftist endeavor to change the nation’s energy policies.

So too there was a concerted effort to enlist evangelicals in the Democrats’ open borders position in order to love one’s neighbors.  A 2020 article in the Baptist Press, “the house organ of the Southern Baptist Convention, published a lie.”  The article claimed that a report linking the Evangelical Immigration Table with George Soros was untrue.  In fact, Basham found, Soros had poured millions of dollars into the organization.  “This was not a small matter because, largely under the direction of, first, Richard Land, and then Russell Moore, the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission [EALC] had become a key leader in the EIT.  Nor were Land and Moore alone.  Leadership for a host of trusted evangelical organizations, including the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the NAE [National Association of Evangelicals], World Relief, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Focus on the Family, Prison Fellowship Ministries, and the Wesleyan Church, had joined hands with the EIT.  If it was being bankrolled by Soros, they would all have a lot of explaining to do” (pp. 33-34).   Though rank-and-file Evangelicals were more concerned about “better border security” than “creating a path to citizenship,” their spokesmen championed open borders as a way of following Jesus.  Eric Metaxas briefly supported the EIT but soon became critical of its agenda, saying:  “‘It’s disturbing that some Christians seem quite happy to twist the scripture that says we are to ‘care for the strangers and aliens among us’ into a carte blanche invitation to enact dramatically destructive immigration policies, as though painting a smiley face over the monstrous reality of encouraging vicious drug cartels and child-sex traffickers.  It’s hard to overstate the blasphemy of using God’s Word in that way’” (p. 50).

As a journalist Basham is deeply distressed by the influence of leftist “money men” on Christian media.  For many decades Christianity Today served as the flagship for Evangelicalism.  Reflecting the views of Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry, the magazine adhered to strongly traditional theological and ethical positions.  Since the dawn of this century, however, progressives have taken control of the publication.  Subscriptions have declined rather dramatically, but financial support from foundations such as the Lilly Endowment have kept CT afloat—and the values of such foundations seem to shape those of the editorial staff.  Indeed:  “a quick look at public campaign records shows that when it comes to political donations, Christianity Today’s heart is most certainly with the party of abortion and the LGBTQ agenda.  Between 2015 and 2022, the outlet’s staff and board members made seventy-four political donations.  Every single one went to Democrats” (p. 75).  Inasmuch as some of the donors were on the editorial staff this was a serious violation of journalistic ethics!  But, amazingly:  “Five different editors at Christianity Today contributed to Democrats (and only Democrats) between 2015 and 2022, including news editor Daniel Silliman” (p. 76).  Sad to say, numbers of other evangelical publicans have also drifted away from their roots, tacking to the winds of contemporary culture.   

In a chapter showing “how the government used pastors to spread Covid-19 propaganda,” Basham details the unprecedented capitulation of churches to the state.  She became “incensed at how the Southern Baptist Convention’s lobbying arm” promoted virtually all the positions set forth by Anthony Fauci and many of the nation’s governors.  Fauci’s emissary to evangelicals was National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, widely respected for his Christian testimony.  (Unknown to many Evangelicals, Collins supported racial quotas and the LGBTP agenda in the NIH, requiring “scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests” (p. 107}).  An organization he founded, BioLogos, “released a public statement titled ‘Love Your Neighbor, Get the Shot’ in favor of vaccines, masks, and lockdown orders” (p. 95).  Ask no questions, just do it!  Ignore, for example, the fact that many of the various governments’ edicts could be seriously challenged, as did the “tens of thousands of epidemiologists and public health scientists, including a Nobel Prize winner.  As the pandemic progressed, they also spoke out against mask and vaccine mandates and called for more serious consideration of vaccine injuries and risk” (p. 96).  One of the authors of the Barrington Declaration, Jay “Bhattacharya told me that while he had long admired Collins before the pandemic, today he believes the former NIH director abused his position both as a public health official and as a trusted Christian voice,” helping sideline any opposition the Church might have mounted (p. 99).  In a 2020 interview published by Christianity Today, famed New York Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller joined Collins in condemning “churches like John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church, which defied Covid lockdowns and resumed meeting after two months, represented the ‘bad and ugly’ of good, bad, and ugly Christian responses to the virus” (p. 104).  Megachurch pastor Rick Warren condemned “the unlovingness of Christians who questioned the efficacy of masks, specifically framing it as a matter of obedience to Jesus” (p. 105).

Turning to a truly sensitive subject, racism, Basham challenges the “social justice” positions of some prominent Megachurch pastors such as J.D. Greear, a recent president of the Southern Baptist Convention. “Their sermon style tends to be similarly informal, rarely taxing attendees’ attention by” exploring theology.  Rather, “a new form of spiritual jargon—words like hegemony and cultural representation—has peppered their preaching.  Out of the pulpit, many have taken up the same social activism that” led to the removal of statues of Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.  “National outlets like PBS and the Washington Post had fawned over Greear” for doing things such as “retiring the 150-year-old presidential gavel that had belonged to Robert E. Lee’s chaplain and the founder of the first Southern Baptist seminary, John Broadus, a man Charles Spurgeon once called the ‘greatest of living preachers.”’  Greear also tried, unsuccessfully, to “change the SBC’s name to “Great Commission Baptists” as part of what the media called as a ‘racial reckoning’ that would give the denomination a ‘global’ identity” (p. 125).   

Unsurprizingly, the Critical Race Theory pastor Greear seems to endorse is taught in some of the SBC’s seminaries and evangelical universities.  For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a noted spokesman for CRT, was asked to address a conference for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, even though he espouses “liberation theology, which mainstream evangelicalism has long acknowledged to be both heretical and Marxist” (p. 131).  In 2021, “Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton, held a racially segregated graduation ceremony for minority students, calling it a ‘Racial and Cultural Minority Senior Recognition Ceremony.’  It also removed a nearly seventy-year-old plaque honoring one of its most famous sons, Jim Elliot, a 1950s missionary who was martyred while witnessing to an Ecuadorean tribe, because the inscription described his murderers as ‘savage’” (p.. 133).  Even Campus Crusade (now called Cru) was accused by some whistleblowers of drifting “‘away from the Great Commission it had always zealously pursued in favor of ‘an agenda of social justice, liberal theology, and CRT.’  A 179-page report presented detailed and well-documented evidence that Cru had begun importing CRT-derived teachings in 2015, ‘embracing a secular system of ideas that divides humanity into victims or oppressors’” (p. 135). 

To Basham:  “Where Christianity teaches that mankind’s greatest need is salvation from his sin, CRT teaches that it is power over his oppressors.”  Whereas the Bible divides people into “sinners and saints,” CRT advocates position them as “victims and oppressors.”   “CRT encourages collective grievance in the first group and collective guilt in the second, without ever dealing with the individual heart. Rather than embracing unity through Christ, it encourages division through ethnicity, pitting groups against one another.  Rather than goodwill, it instills suspicion and bitterness, encouraging its devotees to read bias and secret aggression where none may have been intended.  Dr. Gerald McDermott, the Anglican chair of divinity at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School, rightly called it a ‘new religion’ that ‘encourages people to practice what Jesus condemned, judgment of another person’s thinking and character . . . This is racism by another name.  It is also sinful judgment’” (pp. 130-31).

When #MeToo claims flooded the nation several years ago churches came under the radical feminist spotlight and leftist leaders embraced “MeToo’s dogma that any nebulous definition of power that can be ascribed to men erases agency (and thus responsibility) on the part of women” (p. 158).  The stage was set in 2011 when Arne Duncan, President Obama’s education secretary, “began to give hyperbolic speeches decrying the campus ‘rape culture’ that had given rise to a ‘plague’ of sexual assaults and an ‘epidemic of sexual violence’” (p. 150).  No evidence was given to support this, but it became something of a mantra that would impact churches as well as schools.  In 2019 Russell “Moore unexpectedly changed the theme of the ERLC’s 2019 conference from ‘Gospel Courage’ to what he claimed was the SBC’s ‘Abuse Crisis’” (p. 169).  Subsequently, delegates to the annual convention established an abuse task force to investigate and expose incidents of sexual abuse in local churches.  The results were published in a “Guidepost Report.”  The secular media referred to it as a “bombshell” revealing not “a few bad apples but was a ‘diseased orchard’” (p. 175).  In fact, the report showed that in 21 years there were 409 accused abusers who had some connection with the SBC churches.  Basham says there were probably a million people working in SBC during these years, and “even assuming that every accusation is true (and there’s no reason not to assume that nearly all are), this is, in truth, an astonishingly low rate.”  After a six month investigation Houston Chronicle reporters found the same thing.  Still more, the Guidepost report found “only two alleged abusers were . . . currently serving in Southern Baptist churches.”   “By comparison, Chicago Public Schools is made up of 39,000 employees.  Yet students lodged 470 complaints of sexual abuse against school staffers in 2022 alone” (p. 176).  Basham in no way minimizes the harm done in sexual assaults.  She simply demands the facts be told.  And the fact is there is no “plague” or “epidemic” of sexual assaults in the SBC.

Since the turn of the century, with amazing rapidity America’s mainline churches (the “seven sisters”) endorsed the homosexual agenda.  By-and-large, conservative Evangelicals have retained a traditional sexual ethic, condemning same-sex practices.  But there has been a well-funded LGBTQ effort to get them to be “inclusive.”  The Arcus Foundation spent millions of dollars “”challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine’ within every major Christian denomination.”  This included giving $2,000,000 to a group seeking to “secure the full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the United Methodist Church,’ the last of the mainline denominations still resistant to full affirmation of the entire rainbow panoply” (p. 203).  These activists succeeded, leading to a large exodus of traditional Methodist congregations from the denomination.  Some prominent megachurch pastors, such as Andy Stanley (son off the legendary Charles Stanley), have endorsed the LGBTQ agenda.  Stanley not only pastors a huge Atlanta church but influences hundreds of pastors through his publications.  In a private meeting in Phoenix, AZ, he urged pastors to be more welcoming, saying he encourages “gay couples in his congregation to commit to each other” and get “married in their churches” (p. 199).  At a 2022 conference he praised LGBTQ persons who attend church for having “more faith than I do” and dismissed the “clobber passages” of Scripture generally cited to condemn same-sex activities.   “Stanley had already preached messages about needing to ‘unhitch from the Old Testament,’ seeming to suggest he was laying the groundwork for more liberal theology” (p. 200).  Here’s the truth,” Basham says, “countless tentacles of gay and transgender ideology that have invaded evangelical institutions,” including World Vision and scores of Christian universities, including Baylor, Azusa Pacific, Wheaton, and Calvin.   Since 2019 Christianity Today has published gay-affirming articles.  

Concluding her treatise, Basham confesses to living a wayward life in her early years, addicted to sex and drugs.  During these “wasteland years” various folks, including empathetic Christian psychologists tried to help her.  “But focusing on my upbringing and childhood experiences did nothing to help break the stranglehold of my sin” (p. 235).  What she needed was not therapy but clear doctrinal teaching, calling her to repentance and righteousness.  Reading The Vanishing Conscience by John F. MacArthur she at last confronted the truth that would transform her.  At the same time she found the works of Charles Spurgeon, who staunchly opposed socialism in his day.  In fact:  “‘He savaged it.’  Over a period of years, the Prince of Preachers unhesitatingly taught that Marx’s ‘religion’ desired to ‘supplant’ Christianity” (p. 239).  In the last days of his life, Friedrich Engels (co-author of the Communist Manifesto) said that the man he most disliked was Spurgeon.  To follow in Spurgeon’s steps, opposing the socialists now trying to subvert Evangelicalism, Basham has written this work.  Read it not as the final revelation or a scholarly analysis but as an impassioned call by a well-informed journalist. 

By virtue of the universities where I’ve taught I’ve been privileged to know some of the finest preachers and leaders in the Church of the Nazarene.  Hearing them preach and watching them act enabled me to draw correlations between what they believed and how they behaved.  Just recently three of them (Jim Bond; Jim Diehl; Reuben Welch) have published books that are, for me, especially interesting because they show how their theology and biblical perspectives flowed into effective ministries.  

Fleshing out a text from Exodus, “For he is a  God who is passionate about his relationship with you” (34:14, NLT), Jim Bond’s Talking, Listening, and Walking with the Relational God (Meadville, PA:  Christian Faith Publishing, c. 2024) “has been on the back burner” for many years.  Now in his eighty-eighth year, he has written the book in order to glorify Christ, joining Paul is declaring:  “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”  He “entered into relationship with Jesus at the age of five.  It would be accurate to say that throughout my life I have ‘talked, listened, and walked with the relational God’” (p. xi).  He also writes from a “simple” perspective, trying to make “God’s transforming truth simple, coherent, and livable” (p. xi).  

Reared in Pampa, Texas—a panhandle town of some 20,000 people—Bond remembers it an “idyllic place for me during my adolescence” (p. 3).  It was a good place in part because of the local Church of the Nazarene his family attended.  He loved the church, including Sunday school!  “Here I heard my teacher talk about a wonderful, mysterious man named Jesus” (p. 161).  Then one Sunday morning the pastor finished his sermon with an altar call.  Jim’s much-respected older brother, Bill, responded.  Thinking if it was good for Bill it would be good for him, Jim went forward and knelt at the altar.  The pastor’s wife knelt with him and “said, ‘Jimmy, why don’t you just open the door of your heart and invite Jesus to come in?’”  And at that moment:  “I did.  And He did!” (p. 162).  He was not a prodigal needing to be saved from a sordid life.  Instead:  “What happened to men was powerfully positive:  I was saved to a marvelous, miraculous, grace-filled life, living in intimate, personal, saving relationship with Jesus Christ” (p. 162).  

As he matured he more fully understood what it all meant, finding, with Tim Stafford, that:  “If you want a personal relationship with God, He has already done everything needed to make it possible.  We need only open the door of our heart and invited Him to come in.”  He’d found new life in Christ and he came to understand it as a part of the “prevenient grace” that drew him to Him and continues to sustain him.  In time Jim became a faithful member of the Church of the Nazarene, ever-thankful for the life-giving message he heard as a child.  In hindsight, however, he rather laments the fact that “legalism governed our behavior.”  No smoking, drinking, movies, dancing, etc. “Frankly, I did not rebel.  For the most part, I played by the rules book, and it did me no harm!  In my latter years, I have met many of our vintage who are still carrying baggage over those ‘man-made rules.’  My counsel has been:  ‘Get over it!’  It is small consolation; but I am comforted by reminding myself that the leaders, pastors, and people of that era were doing the best they had been taught.  I think legalism in my denomination is passe at this time.  Good riddance!  I am all right with guidelines, not rules!” (p. 165).  

In addition to church, young Jim Bond found basketball!  As a sophomore he started, alongside his elder brother, for the Pampa Harvesters, and they lost only two games.  The next two years they went undefeated, winning two state championships, and Jim was named first team all state.  As one of the nation’s premier athletes he then played for the South team in the all-American high school game in Kentucky.  “We won the game.  I scored fifteen points and got some key rebounds.  Following the game, I was named to the Chuck Taylor 1954 First Team High School All-American Basketball Team” (p. 168).  Following the state championship game a sports editor called him “Gentleman Jim Bond”—a label that stuck and perfectly describes him.  Many collegiate scholarships were offered him and he initially decided to attend Texas A&M.  But he felt uneasy with that decision and felt God leading him to Pasadena College, a Nazarene school that had a basketball team.  

At Pasadena he enjoyed sustained success.  Though it was a tiny college the basketball team defeated many opponents from larger schools and  Bond was “named to the NAIA all-American team during my sophomore year.”  He and some Pasadena alumni put together an AAU team that won the Southern California AAU championship and then went to the national finals, where he was named the “Most Promising Young Player of the tournament” (p. 169).  He was then asked to join the Phillips Oilers AAU team, which led to him being asked to join the U.S. Olympic team in Melbourne, Australia, though he was not part of the active roster.  Returning to school in Pasadena he continued playing basketball and become quite legendary, earning membership in several of Halls of Fame.  Throughout his storied career “Gentleman Jim” sought to both give witness to his faith and live out the Gospel while on the court.  The “greatest gratification is that it provided me a lifelong platform for witness to Christ, my Savior and Lord” (p. 171).  

Graduating from Pasadena College and marrying his wonderful sweetheart Sally, Bond attended Nazarene Theological Seminary and began his pastoral ministry.  From Olathe, KS. to Casper, WY, to College Church in Nampa, ID, he flourished as a pastor, gaining considerable attention throughout the denomination.  Then he felt called to apply for a missionary assignment and was sent to Brazil.  He and Sally began with a year of language study but unexpectedly got involved in a dispute over speaking in tongues.  After prayerfully studying the scriptures he took a position that led to his recall from the mission field!  But he was soon called to pastor Lakeview Park Church in Oklahoma City, followed by three years pastoring First Church of the Nazarene in Colorado Springs, CO.  Difficulties in that church led to him moving across the campus to become chaplain and professor of practical theology at Nazarene Bible College.  Three years later Bill Draper, president of Point Loma College in San Diego, asked him to become the special assistant to the president.  Two years later, when Draper was battling cancer, Jim took his place representing the college across the educational zone.   Following Draper’s death the college’s board of trustees elected Jim to succeed him.  He didn’t immediately respond but took a week to fast and pray.  The last day of his retreat, “Suddenly, the blessed Spirit came!  My anxieties were calmed and the Lord flooded my would with assurance of adequate grace daily for the task.”  Consequently, “Sally and I spent the next fourteen years of our lives at Point Loma.  It was the most challenging, fulfilling, and fun years of our ministry” (p. 197).  (And for those us who worked with him during those years it was a wonderful time!)  

At the General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene in 1996 Jim Bond was elected to the Board of General Superintendents, the highest office in the denomination, serving eight years in that position.  About his election—and his years of service—he says nothing!  But he does devote a number of pages to his understanding of leadership.  He sees himself as a “democratic leader” and so he has been.  Let others call you to leadership rather than seeking it.  Above all, “the leader of any Christian organization must be a fully devoted follower of Jesus who is living Christlike!” (p. 203).  Understanding this we understand why Bond devotes most of his book to theology—no doubt rooted in H. Orton Wiley’s three volume Systematic Theology studied by most Nazarene ministers 60 years ago, but amplified by a number of more recent works.  Gentleman Jim’s life bears witness to the everlasting truths he learned as a disciple of Christ.  Affirming his belief in God’s existence, he cites both distinguished scholars and personal reflections on the beauty of Colorado’s high country which has always been a vital part of his life.  God not only exists but has created all that is.  Because He is Love he made a world open to his revelation and invitation.  We can enter into a relationship with Him, listening and walking with Him.  Despite the ravages of sin, we can be restored to fellowship with our Creator.  We can not only be forgiven but cleansed and empowered by the Holy Spirit to walk rightly with Him.  

As he devotes many chapters to explaining these doctrines Bond remains ever the evangelist and pastor, urging readers to come to Christ and enjoy new life in Him.  

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  Jim Diehl successfully pastored churches in Iowa, Georgia, and Colorado.  He served as district superintendent of Nebraska and Colorado.  And he was elected a general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, serving eight years in that office.  He worked as vice president for development at Mid-America Nazarene College for a few years and while he was there and I got to know him and his wife Dorothy, mainly because my wife Roberta did secretarial work for him.  (Many years later, when I was retiring from Point Loma Nazarene University, Jim was presiding over the district assembly.  After briefly noting my contributions to the church Jim launched into a celebration of Roberta’s expertise as his office manager!  I then recognized whom he most valued!).  Although he did many things well, Jim Diehl is best renowned for his preaching.  Few men I’ve heard have the almost magical ability to stand behind a pulpit and quickly elevate his hearers.  Mixing biblical truths and personal anecdotes with a contagious sense of humor, Diehl proclaims the Gospel in thoroughly winsome ways.  During the COVID panic, when he could not move about the country preaching, he decided (in his mid-eighties) to launch a series of pod-casts to continue his preaching ministry, calling it “10 Minutes to Refuel with Pastor Jim Diehl.”  Hundreds of folks tuned in to listen for 59 weeks.  Then a friend offered to transcribe the tapes into a book, and it’s now available:   Refuel, Refresh, Revive (Dust Jacket Media. Kindle Edition, c. 2023).  “You will need to understand,” he says, “that these were not originally written out—rather, they were spoken.”  He calls his talks “sermonettes” designed “to refuel, refresh, and revive your soul in the midst of your busy week.  They’re not “devotionals” exegeting and expositing a passage of scripture.  Nor are they structured to develop a thesis, as one does writing a book.  Rather they are texts or ideas that come to him that led him to develop a brief message.  

His first sermonette, “Mother Goose at Bear Creek Park,” recalls a time when both he was with his wife, Dorothy, were in a Denver hospital.  While there he “received a report from the urologist that I had a cancerous tumor in my bladder” that was “‘high-grade cancer, very aggressive’” (p. 16).  To process the troubling situation he took his dog for a walk in a the nearby Bear Creek Park and encountered a flock of Canadian geese.  As he approached a mother goose and her chicks she spread her wings over them to protect them.  As he walked away, Diehl saw a feather on the ground and picked it up.  At that moment, “I felt as if the Holy Spirit of God whispered in my ear, ‘That’s what I want to do for you and Dorothy. I want you to come on in close to me now and let me cover you with my feathers—and under my wings you will be safe’” (p. 17).  That led him to ponder verses from Psalm 91, which assured him that “You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor the destruction that lays waste at noonday” (vv. 5–6).  Fear not!  Then the next morning he looked out  his bedroom window and saw a feather in his backyard.  “It was not lying on the ground—it was sitting straight up.  I’ve lived here five or six years and had never seen a feather in the yard—ever!  And I haven’t seen one since.  As I picked up that feather, I really believe the Lord winked at me and said, “What do you think of that, son?  What do you think of that?”  I said, “Lord, I can’t imagine” (p. 19).  “So now I have two feathers.  I don’t worship these feathers, but they’re symbols to me that God is taking care of us, and God will take care of you!” (p. 19).  Thereafter both Dorothy and Jim came back to health and he urged hearers  “during the wonderful Easter week, resurrection Sunday, or anytime—get under the wings of God and take refuge and don’t fear.  God is bigger than any situation!  God is bigger than “What’s the matter?” Get under His wings!

In “Don’t Jump off a Bridge to Rescue a Hat,” Diehl reflects on a lesson learned at the beginning of his ministry.  Attending a conference he heard a seasoned preacher warn against unwise responses.  “He was talking about a bridge over a river.  ‘Jump off a bridge to rescue a child and you’re a hero; jump off a bridge to rescue a hat and you’re a fool.’  I knew that had to mean something high-powered.  So I wrote that down in the back of my Bible along with all the other truths I was learning.  That has come back to me over and over across the years:  ‘Don’t jump off a bridge to rescue a hat’” (p. 50).  After reflecting on the incident where Jesus healed the man at the pool of Bethesda, Diehl urged hearers to avoid wasting time worrying about or doing non-essential things.  Take, for instance, the “worship wars!”  To him it’s a “disgrace!  Worship wars!  What is that? Are we going to sing the hymns and the gospel songs?  Or are we going to sing choruses?”  Sadly:  “This issue has started more church fights than I can count:  Are we going to keep the choir and let them be part of the worship, or are we going to dismiss the choir and have a praise team? That’ll stir up the troops for sure” (p. 52).  After pointing out similar issues that distract us, Diehl confessed that he was recently worrying about an issue and “said, ‘Lord, what are we going to do about this?’  The Lord said to me in my mind, ‘I didn’t die on the cross for a structure; I died to win people to Jesus.’  I let the thing go; I had to move on.  You know, it’s a hard thing to keep ‘the main thing the main thing,’ but that’s my plea with you today and with me, that . . . we refuse to jump off a bridge for a hat.  May we live to focus on the main things— not the minor things that don’t make an eternal difference anyway” (p. 53).

Discussing two of the persistent temptations we face—“If Only” and “What If ?”—Diehl urges us to focus on what is, not what might have been.  Satan works us over with “simple words:  If only.  Yes, If only.  If only I’d never moved to this town.  If only I had graduated when I had a chance.  Now, we need to be careful with this one—If only I had never married her or married him.  If only I wouldn’t have done that stupid thing—that was more than stupid; it was wrong.  If only I had . . . If only I had not . . . If only!” (p. 124).  It’s an old, old story, evident in Numbers 14, wherein “All the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, ‘If only we had died in the land of Egypt!  Or if only we had died in this wilderness!’” If you’ve done wrong or made a mistake, Jim says, “put it under the blood of Jesus!  It is all there; I’m not going to let the devil rob me of my peace because of something in the past.”  Do you know that you cannot change the past?  So give it to God!!” (p. 125).  When we’re not obsessed with “If Only” we may get troubled by “What If?”  Reflecting one of his bouts with cancer, he confesses “the What ifs started up in my mind: ‘What if the cancer is beyond the bladder?  What if he must remove my bladder?  What if I can’t be traveling and preaching anymore because of complications?’”  But the treatments proved successful, and “I’m still feeling fine, my energy is still running strong, and God keeps opening doors for my preaching ministry.  In fact, I’m preaching more than when I was a pastor!  All of that is to say, ‘God is bigger than the What ifs.’” (p. 126).  So He Is and that’s Good News!

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When I spoke at Point Loma College’s 40 years ago I met Reuben Welch, the college chaplain.  Returning to the campus in 1982 as a visiting professor, my wife Roberta and I became friends with Reuben and Mary Jo.  As he was retiring that year he encouraged me to consider replacing him as chaplain and doors opened for me to do so in the fall of 1983.  He was ever-encouraging and we were truly blessed to know and rely on him and Mary Jo.  When I moved into his office as chaplain, I found he’d left me a rock on which a student had painted the title of one of his books—When You Run out of Fantastic . . . Persevere.”  That simple phrase, in many ways, sums up much of his philosophy and what he stressed in his messages.  In the Church of the Nazarene he was truly a legendary preacher, leaving his imprint on numbers of young people.  In addition to preaching he published several books, most famously We Really Do Need Each Other.  Inasmuch as he is now nearly 100 years old, Reuben’s daughter Susan decided to put together some of his recorded sermons to celebrate his life and ministry.  The collection is titled I Think I Think: Vintage Sermons by Reuben Welch (Kansas City: The Foundry Publishing, c. 2024; Kindle Edition). 

In the book’s forward, Ron Benefiel (a pastor who became president of Nazarene Theological Seminary before returning to Point Loma to assume a variety of assignments) recalls that Reuben “became chaplain of Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) when I was a student there in 1968.”  The Vietnam War was igniting student protests, national leaders were assassinated, and the times were certainly challenging.  “Reuben Welch took center stage as our college chaplain in the middle of those times.  He was an engaging speaker with a great sense of humor.  But, much more than that, he was a New Testament scholar who knew how to speak words of wisdom and truth to an auditorium full of radicalized college students.  For many of us—I daresay most of us—he became one of the most influential people in our lives.  For those of us going into pastoral ministry, he was our model of what good preaching could be.  For those of us who simply needed counsel from someone over the age of thirty whom we could trust, he was the listener who showed us what it meant to care for others. We all wanted to be like Reuben!” (p. 7).  

Explaining why she selected the sermons for the book, Susan, says:  “I think I think . . .” is a phrase that’s always been associated with my dad, almost as much as “We really do need each other.”  It captures the marvelous tension he maintained between what he was sure about and what he was still considering.  That openness to new ideas, a tentativeness about non-essentials, is one of the qualities that endeared him to so many.  Preparing this collection of my dad’s sermons has been a joyful journey. I have been blessed over and over as I’ve listened to numerous cassette recordings of him preaching, some from as early as 1968.  At ninety-nine years of age, his voice is so much weaker now; getting to hear him in his prime has been a poignant treat. I have chosen ten of my favorite sermons to include in this volume, all previously unpublished” (p. 14).  For those of us who have heard him speak, reading the sermons allows us to remember how he spoke.  Reading some of the sermon’s titles—“He Did Not Have to Survive,” “When God Contradicts God,” “Give Your Bod to God”—reminds us of the phrases he coined that stick with us.  

Common to all his sermons was a healthy dose of Scripture.  Welch read extended sections and quoted many more.  One sensed that he sought to get into the heart of biblical passages and to graft them into his heart.  Unlike classic expository messages, his were extended meditations on what the scripture under consideration reveals.  He would explain and then chew on the text, repeating it and rephrasing it, wondering at what it meant for him and his hearers.  He invited hearers to think with him.  Thus the book’s title, “I Think I Think,” captures a great deal of his mode of preaching.  For example, after reading most of Hebrews 11, he noted that he hears the text telling us that “faith is not just something you have, faith is something you do!” (p.  23).  In fact, he declared:  “Faith needs to be teased a little bit into something active like ‘faithing’” (p. 26).  After revisiting the long list of biblical heroes—Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, et al.—Reuben takes us to Calvary, saying:  “‘Oh Jesus, what are you doing hanging on that cross between two thieves?”  Can you hear him?  ‘I’m faithing, I’m faithing!’  You see, it’s not just something we have; it isn’t something we carry around with us.  But. It.  Is.  Something.  We. DO.  Amen!  Well, what about us? We’re making our choices, making our decisions, walking our walk, offering our offerings, making our sacrifices, but mostly, we are living and working and walking and doing . . . That’s faithing, isn’t it?  Well, actually, I hear another word from these saints.  You know what I hear them say?  ‘It pays to hang on!’ I’m sure there is a more theological way to say that, but the only other theological term I can come up with is, ‘’Don’t quit!’” (pp. 27-28).

Don’t quit!  Hang in there!  Persevere!  That’s a consistent refrain in these sermons.  That Reuben’s done—and God willing so will we who know and love him.  

Few of us are lawyers but all of us benefit from law-abiding communities.  St Thomas Aquinas defined a law as “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.”  There are, Aquinas explained, four different kinds of law.  There is an Eternal Law, resident in the mind of God and largely known only to Him, whereby all creation functions.  We discern aspects of this in such things as the law of gravity and second law of thermodynamics.  There is also the Divine Law—Revelation—given by God to His prophets, best evident in the Ten Commandments received by Moses.  Then there is Positive Law, set forth by legislators and interpreted by judges, giving purely human decrees that are constantly changing and dramatically different in various cultures.  Setting speed limits or leveling taxes or establishing schools are all illustrations of positive laws.  

Finally, there is the Natural Law, rooted in our ability to reason, described by Moses when he gave his final address to the children of Israel, saying:   “For this commandment which I command you today is not mysterious for you, nor is it far off.  It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend into the heaven for us and bring it to its, that we may hear it and do it?  Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cover over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’  But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in hour heart, that you may do it” (Dt. 30:11-14).  Centuries later St Paul, writing the Romans, said much the same:  “for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them” (Ro 2:13-14).  

Abraham Lincoln, deeply read in the Bible, illustrated his commitment to the Natural Law in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858.  Douglas championed “popular sovereignty”—allowing the people to decide whether or not to enslave people, making laws purely conventional, rooted in whatever people momentarily desire.  He was, in today’s terms, a “pro-choice” advocate of “cultural relativism.”  For him, right and wrong were ultimately a matter of power—the power of the ballot box.  The majority rules simply because it has more votes.  It uses its power to dictate whatever it wants.  To Douglas, only positive laws authorized by the people mattered.  As Lincoln understood:  “When Judge Douglas says he ‘don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down’ . . . he can thus argue logically if he don’t see anything wrong in it; but he cannot say so logically if he admits that slavery is wrong.  He cannot say that he would as soon see a wrong voted up as voted down.  When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”

Lincoln, however, insisted there’s a higher law, a moral law, an eternally and universally true standard, that decreed slavery intrinsically wrong.  This Natural Law forever supersedes human laws.  Lincoln believed that this nation’s Founders set forth revolutionary documents (the Declaration of Independence and Constitution) rooted in  “abstract” truths “applicable to all times and places.”  He opposed slavery not because he disagreed with the legislators in Alabama or Missouri but because he thought it was immoral— something contrary to the Natural Law.  As many legal scholars explain, the same philosophical issues that divided the country in 1860 now divide us when dealing with abortion, same-sex marriage, and the notion that one can decide whether to be a man or a woman.  Nor was Lincoln alone in rejecting the legitimacy of slavery.  A Supreme Court Justice, Benjamin Curtis, dissenting from the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case, declared that slavery was condemned by the Natural Law and no number of state statutes could make it right.  

For many decades Hadley Arkes (a retired professor from Amherst College) has espoused a Natural Law ethic and effectively worked in the political sphere for legislation such as the “born alive infant protection” and “defense of marriage” acts.  A secular Jew for most of his life, he recently entered the Catholic Church, influenced by pro-life Christians defending unborn children, concluding the Church is a “truth-telling institution” that opposes relativism.  Forty years ago he cogently set forth his views in FirstThings:  An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice, and he recently reaffirmed  his positions in Mere Natural Law:  Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution (Washington, D.C.:  Regency Publishing, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  The distinguished editor of the New Criterion, Roger Kimball, says:  “Mere Natural Law deserves to be set alongside C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in its profundity and gimlet-eyed appreciation of the manifold depredations of our relativistic culture, hankering everywhere after false gods.  Arkes is a natural teacher, and his deep appreciation of the Natural Law roots of the American Founding make this book an indispensable Baedeker for our amnesiac times.”  

Arkes dedicated this book to his late wife, Judy, who remembered Lincoln’s statement that we Americans were conducting a great “experiment” in self-governance. She lamented that it now seemed as if “everything touching the terms of principle on which a people lived, the way we governed ourselves, and the moral codes by which we would try to live our lives together” was collapsing.  Perhaps, she feared, the great “experiment” was failing!  She realized that our country is now led by folks such as Barack Obama, who (in The Audacity of Hope)rejected any “absolute” truths in order to achieve what he believed is “implicit in the very idea of ordered liberty.”  For Obama and our cultural elites, relativism rules.  To Nietzshe:  “You have your way.  I have my way.  As for the right way it does not exist.”  Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes declared:  “Moral rights—if there are any—These are for the philosopher,” lacking any practical value.  He rejected moral truths, saying rights come from a gun barrel, reducing them to whatever works for those win power.  This position subsequently informed the opinion of Judge Jon Newman in Connecticut, who said:  “Abortion and childbirth, when stripped of the sensitive moral arguments surrounding the abortion controversy, are simply two alternative medical methods of dealing with pregnancy….”  To kill or not to kill an innocent child is simply a pragmatic decision without moral content. 

Arkes, looking back over the past half-century, confesses he can hardly believe “just how far the passion for relativism would unfurl—to the point where people with advanced degrees forcefully insist that we cannot tell the difference between a male and a female.  That difference now is regarded in some quarters as merely ‘assigned’ at birth.  And so we are required by the courts to affirm that a man may pronounce himself a woman—or a woman, a man—solely on the strength of an earnest report on his (or her) feelings” (p. 2).  But this confusion is easily understood once we admit to having lost the “commonsense understanding of ordinary people, in which the Natural Law finds its ground.  Cicero, reaching for the heights in his Republic, gave us the most stirring description and the loftiest hopes for the Natural Law:  that ‘there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times’” (p. 3).  

The Natural Law is both deeply moral and thoroughly logical.  As such it is rejected by progressives such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, who insist the right to abortion is the flag of freedom, far more important than freedoms of religion and speech.  Amazingly, even conservative politicians and jurists (including the late Justice Scalia) who personally oppose abortion fail to craft their case in accord with the Natural Law!  By saying individual states may decree whether or not abortion is legal they fall back into the position of Stephen Douglas—popular sovereignty!  By and large, conservatives “lost their conviction about any such anchoring truths grounded in the canons of reason, and along with that loss of conviction came a posture of mirthless derision of the Natural Law” (p. 13).  But there are inescapable “anchoring truths” evident in the Laws of Reason, especially in the Law of Contradiction.  Two contradictory propositions cannot both be true.  Self-contradictory propositions collapse into nonsense when rightly analyzed.  

This nation’s founders—including Supreme Court justices James Wilson and John Marshall—routinely cited “axioms” supporting their judgments, revealing the influence of the “common sense” philosophy of Thomas Reid.  Immediately following its ratification, Wilson insisted the Constitution was written “not to invent new rights ‘by a human establishment,’ but to secure and enlarge the rights we already have by nature” (p. 81).  “Reid caught the precise sense of this matter in his classic Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind: ‘[T]here are truths, both speculative and moral, which a man left to himself would never discover; yet when they are fairly laid before him, he owns and adopts them, not barely upon the authority of his teacher, but upon their own intrinsic evidence, and perhaps wonders that he could be so blind as to not see them before’” (p. 24).  There are things we can’t not know because they are simply self-evident.  They are always, everywhere, undeniably true—per se nota. “Thomas Jefferson caught the sense of the matter quite aptly when he remarked, in a letter to Peter Carr in August 1787, that one could ‘state a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules’” (p. 42).  When highly educated people, including a current justice on the Supreme Court, claim to not know what makes a woman a woman one rightly turns to a rancher who will explain it to her in a brief phrase!  

To illustrate this, Arkes says:  “In the fetching early pages of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis appealed to the moral understanding that can be grasped, at its root, with the common sense of ordinary people.  He conjured up some familiar lines, likely to be heard any day from ‘children as well as grownups,’ from ‘educated people as well as uneducated’: ‘They may say things like this: “How’d you like if anyone did the same to you?”—“That’s my seat, I was there first”—“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you shove in first?”—“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”—“Come on, you promised.”  People say things like that every day….’ (p. 30).  Still more:  “Lewis used the disarming example of children to teach another lesson that Aristotle had taught in his Politics:  that it is the distinct nature of human beings to complain, show outrage or a sense of grievance on matters high and low, and to be given to argument.  As Aristotle said, animals may emit sounds to indicate pleasure or pain, but the speech of human beings is of a world apart.  Human beings can offer judgments on what is good or bad, just and unjust.  They can reason over matters of right and wrong”  (p. 32).

Along with C.S. Lewis and Aristotle, Arkes finds much to admire in Thomas Aquinas, who “offered to us as the true ‘first principle of practical reason’ (primum principium in ratione practica):  ‘that good is to be done, evil to be avoided’ (bonum est faciendum et prosquendum, et malum vitandum).  That principle captures the logic of morals:  that the good is higher, more desirable than the bad; that the good should be promoted and the bad discouraged, forbidden, and at times punished” (p. 63). It just makes sense, as Aquinas saw, “that in every act we take to seek change or oppose change, we must have at least some rough understanding of what things are good or bad, better or worse.  Do we go to college or get a job?  If we get a job, is it in a legitimate business or a business skirting the law?  In any case, we move with an understanding of what things we find not only desirable or undesirable, but also right or wrong.  Those judgments form the ground of our most practical acts.  There is nothing airy about them, for they are precise enough to stir people to act.  And if people are moved in their most natural acts to seek the things they find desirable, it follows that they tend to steer away or shun the things they find undesirable or wrong.  In other words, this first principle is something we grasp a priori” (p. 65).

If we’re obliged to do good we’re equally obliged to oppose evil.  We ought nurture babies and oppose torturing them.  But following Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court routinely upheld the “right” to kill a child, irrationally refusing to acknowledge “that persistent, awkward truth: that the child has never been a part of the mother, and never anything but the same human being at any stage of the pregnancy.  Even when it came to the later stages of pregnancy, the child was referred to persistently as mere ‘potential life.’  For the sake of staying faithful to those earlier concessions of the Court, Justice Alito was content to keep using that phrase, even though he surely knew that it made no sense:  The embryo or fetus in the womb can never have been merely ‘potential life’” (p. 240).  Despite much obfuscation, the courts of the country embraced and enforced the view that Might makes Right.  Abortion was allowed not because it is good but because the people want it.  

What the courts refused to consider was the moral aspects of abortion.  And this is precisely what Aries wants done.  There is a higher law that should shape human laws.  There is a Natural Law that must be reinstated in our judicial system—and in our schools and churches.    

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In Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths:  The Touchstone of the Natural Law (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, c. 2010), Hadley Arkes collected some of his essays explaining and defending the Natural Law tradition.  He reflects that he has “expended most of my slender arts as a writer over the last thirty years in making the case for natural rights and natural law,” endeavoring to resist the pervasive “moral relativism in forms now so familiar that most people are hardly even aware of them.  Historians seem barely conscious of any vice of ‘historicism,’ but they seem to fall easily into the assumption, for example, that the American Founders were men of their own age.”  The sentiments of the Declaration of Independence and its “self-evident” truths (such as “all me were created equal”) was true enough then but perhaps not now!  Arkes has written rather prolifically, but most everything can be understood as a stout defense of the currently disfavored Natural Law

Most of the book’s chapters are focused on important Supreme Court decisions, such as Lochner v. New York and Near v. Minnesota, and are only of interest to legal scholars.  But the thrust of the book is to uphold the notion embraced by many great legal scholars such as Blackstone, who insisted there are some very clear “laws of reason and nature” that must be consulted as we promulgate and enforce human laws.  We do have a written Constitution that is worthy of our respect, but it must always be interpreted with an eye on the “first principles” of logic and ethics that are universal and ultimately definitive.  The Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments) is an important part of the Constitution, but too many judges and lawyers think it says our rights are given by the state rather than—as the Declaration of Independence insisted—God.  There has, particularly in the nation’s elite universities, come a “subtle shift … from natural rights to positive rights, from rights grounded in the nature off human beings a ‘moral agents,’ to the sense rather of rights that have standing as rights because we have decided, as a people, too confer them on one another” (p. 7).  Arkes wrote these essays to call us back to an original understanding of the Constitution as a servant of, not a lord over, the Natural Law. 

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel. Brideshead Revisted, one the characters considered the historicist claim that morality continually evolves, that what’s right today may be wrong a century from now.  He “seemed to grasp almost intuitively the logic that had to attach to the notion of ‘commending’ a ‘good.’  It was a matter of moving beyond ‘personal feelings,’ to the grounds of reason that made a thing ‘good’ for others as well as ourselves.  It was a shift from notions of good that are entirely personal, subjective, and perhaps ephemeral, to notions of a good that are reasoned, impersonal, universal, and far more enduring” (p. 13).   This was the position taken by the Founders of the United States.  A clause in the Constitution cannot mean one thing in one century and something entirely different in the next.  They could not envision the “legal positivism” espoused by Oliver Wendall Holmes that came to dominate the courts in the 20th century, and they would certainly have opposed it.  

One of the New Deal justices appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert Jackson, shared Holmes’ positivism when serving on the Supreme Court.  But when he was acting as prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, seeking to punish prominent Nazis, he invoked the Natural Law!  The tradition he had rejected was the only one capable of bringing criminals to justice.  They hadn’t violated German laws, but they were guilty of something worse, violating universal moral principles.  It’s simply wrong to deliberately kill innocent people, even when the laws of your nation prescribe it.  So Jackson and his colleagues insisted the Nazis be hanged not because they violated a written law but because they failed to follow “those deeper principles of what we used to call ‘common sense,’ even without the law” (p. 37).  These principles, as. Immanuel Kant said, are uniquely found in “a rational being.”  They are what Aristotle (in Posterior Analytics) said “the primitive, immediate principles” that resemble axioms in geometry.  If you cannot simply see that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line you will never advance in understanding plain geometry!  So too, James Wilson, a member of the Supreme Court in the 1790s, relied on “principles of reason” that enable us to know anything at all.  There are simply “self-evident” truths easily grasped by rational creatures.  Aquinas said they are understood per se nota, absolutely true when seen.  If you cannot understand the law of contradiction when it’s stated you’ll never get it!  

Defending the proposed Constitution of the United States in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton said:  “In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.  These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind…. Of this nature are the maxims in geometry that the whole is greater than its parts….  Of the same nature are the other maxims in ethics and politics” (No. 31).  Certain ethical principles have been embraced may millions of men throughout many centuries. Don’t steal.  Don’t bear false witness!  Don’t covet!  Don’t murder!   “And yet, in our own day, these classic arguments, grounded in the plainest things we can know, have actually been derided and rejected by the orthodoxies now dominant on American campuses.  The fashionable doctrines of postmodernism and radical feminism have denied that we can know moral truths, let alone truths that hold across different countries and cultures.  And at the foundation of everything, the exponents of the doctrines often deny that there is really a human nature.  What we take to human nature they regard as ‘social constructs’ that vary from one place to another according to the vagaries of local cultures” (p. 47).  Thus we have eminent scholars who condemn killing on the basis of race but defend admitting students to universities because they meet racial quotas!  

On his final page Arkes restates what he has repeatedly asserted:  “The task is to trace matters back to the root, to those first principles that anchor our judgments.”  If one studies carefully:  “Beneath the layers of law, embedded now in custom, is a structure of moral argument and moral understandings.  Those anchoring, first principles explain, at the root, the grounds of our judgments on the things that are right or wrong, just or unjust.  If we can return to the root, with an inquiry that is distinctly philosophic, we can expect to tap again the deeper principles of the law; and in opening them anew, see again their fuller reach.  At the end of the day and the end of the exercise, we find ourselves, as we often do, conforming an older wisdom.  We may merely remind ourselves of what that first generation of Americans managed to grasp when they said, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, that ‘no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue’—and a ‘frequent appeal to first principles’” (p. 262).

James Lindsay holds a Ph.D. in mathematics but has turned his attention to cultural issues in a series of books, including Cynical Theories, that his critics claim are far right and nationalistic.  He has, however, been praised by both Stephen Pinker, a Harvard University psychologist, and and Al Mohler, a conservative Southern Baptist, who are anything but bedfellows.  He does meticulous research, documents his findings, and certainly provides perspectives worth considering.  In The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (New Discourses, c. 2022, Kindle Edition) he argues that much of the modern educational establishment has been deeply influenced by a self-identifying Brazilian Marxist.  He begins with an anecdote.  Following the tragic killings in a Uvalde, Texas, school, a legislator in Providence, Rhode Island—who calls herself a “queer educator” and “abortion funder”—urged students to walk out of their classes and take to the streets to protest gun violence, which they did.  Neither she nor the educational establishment seems overly concerned by the fact that 94% of Providence students aren’t proficient in math and 86% can’t read or write on grade level.  But they’re quite adept at staging a protest at the state capitol.  The reason for this, Lindsay thinks, is that “education has been stolen right out from under us and from our children.  This theft of education has a purpose; it enables a counterfeit to replace it.  The mechanism and description of this gigantic educational ripoff can be summarized in a single sentence:  Our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools” (p. 7).

Many years ago I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and took it as an example of the impact Marxism was having in Latin and South America, especially in the “liberation theology” widely espoused within Christian (mainly Catholic) circles.  In fact, Freire may be rightly understood as one of the liberation theologians of his era.  Little did I imagine that Pedagogy of the Oppressed would become widely praised and utilized in the United States.  But by 1995 it had become part of the curricula in schools of education and and “the intervening quarter century has seen enough turnover of the teachers to have fundamentally remade our schools and thus education itself.  Kids still go to school, but school isn’t school anymore. The teachers have been replaced with activists, and education has been turned into ‘conscientization,’ the process of seeing the world from the so-called standpoint of the oppressed” (p. 16).  Still more:  Freire is also widely cited in educational journals—generally called “Critical Pedagogy” or “Critical Education Theory.”  In fact:  Freire is “the third most-cited scholarly author in all of the humanities and social sciences by authoritative metrics” (p. 15).

Rooted in the revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Marx, Freire wanted to transform his world.  He especially sought to overcome the damage done by colonialism, so he generally romanticized precolonial, primitive societies wherein “noble savages” thrived.  Thus the call to “decolonize the curriculum!” Get rid of dead, white males!  “Decolonizing the curriculum means replacing articles of ‘formal education’ or ‘literacy’” with a more Woke Course of studies.  “The English literature curriculum has to be ‘decolonized’ by removing Shakespeare” and introducing more “relevant” texts celebrating diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Even mathematics must “be replaced with ‘ethnomathematics’ (and even the wildly nonsensical ‘mathematx’) for the same ‘decolonization’ purpose” (p. 138).  Consequently:  “Education, for Freire, is going to be a process of learning to ‘transform reality,’ which is the essential Marxist project” (p. 47).  This begins by constantly criticizing the world as it is—finding fault with institutions, historical heroes, classical art and music.  Embracing Marx’s call for a “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” Freirian educators should plow up the soil and plant new seeds rather than water what is already growing.  Pointing out the “contradictions” in the status quo enables teachers to point to how things should be if the revolution transforms them.  Traditional education, with its emphasis on mastering certain subjects, such as reading and mathematics, oppresses students by readying them to cooperate with an unjust society.  Most of us want youngsters to simply become literate, butFreire calls for “political literacy”—learning to use words and launch movements to advance a leftist agenda.  Learning to read books is less important than learning to agitate in the streets.  This follows Karl Marx’s goal of getting power in order to transform the world.  By looking at things from the side of the world’s “oppressed,” students are encouraged to “die and be resurrected” and enlist in the “permanent struggle” for liberation. 

Freirian teachers are not purveyors of knowledge intent in imparting what’s known to their students.  They are, rather, “facilitators” determined to work alongside school kids critiquing the status quo and drafting utopian plans for a better world.  They are to become “change agents” protesting global warming or supporting Hamas massacring Jews.  Large numbers of public schools embrace a program called “Transformative Social-Emotional Learning” (SEL) designed to do precisely such things.  It’s a form of “emotional manipulation” whereby an alleged teacher becomes an “unlicensed social worker” or “unqualified psychologist” doing anything but providing instruction in grammar and geography.  “Our kids currently go to Paulo Freire’s schools,” Lindsay says in his concluding section.  “These schools are unambiguously Marxist (unless we split hairs and call them neo-Marxist or Woke Marxist) in their architecture, pedagogy, methods, and goals. They have abandoned the idea of educating American children to grow toward becoming successful and prosperous adults in American society because they want to undermine, destroy, and replace American society.  Rather than teaching literacy, numeracy, or other educational basics, Freirean schools use subject matter like reading, writing, mathematics, history, social studies, and science lessons to teach Marxist consciousness of one or more forms at a time.  As a result of more than a decade of this practice, American schoolchildren are almost universally failing in basic competency in virtually every subject at virtually every grade level.”  Lindsay insists “correcting the problem of Freirean education is a high-priority item,” for it’s indoctrination rather than education.  Indeed it is a form of progressive religion that should be removed from public schools. 

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Pete Hegseth, who cohosts FOX & Friends Weekend, wrote Battle for the American Mind (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2022;  Kindle Edition) with assistance from David Goodwin (a businessman who helped found The Ambrose School in Boise, Idaho) to emphasize classical Christian education.  Hegseth declares:  “It is my brokenness that brings me to this book.  Our brokenness.  Nothing but the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ affords these two authors—Pete Hegseth (me) and David Goodwin—the sufficiency to undertake such an audacious task:  writing a book that motivates others to reorient their lives around the education of their most precious gift—their children and grandchildren.” (p. xv).  The authors want something better than the progressive pedagogy they received and most of our their children are receiving.  Goodwin has done the research and Hegseth uses his rhetorical skill to make the case for taking a different (if ancient) approach to educating the nation’s youth.

Hegseth earlier published two “books on the fight for the future of America,” but he thinks this one more important.  Abraham Lincoln rightly said that “the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation becomes the philosophy of government in the next,” and Hegseth, along with many parents, suddenly discovered what was happening in the schoolrooms when they shut down during the COVID panic.  “Seemingly out of nowhere—and accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020—concepts like white privilege and systemic racism and even a new founding date for America, the year 1619, were splashed across computer screens all over America.  Critical race theory had fully arrived (often masked as ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’), along with a full-on attempt to redefine gender, infuse climate fatalism, and turn our children into activists. These types of revelations were powerful because they were not the result of media exposure, but instead a bottom-up, and often apolitical, recognition by parents that the very foundation of American education had taken a radical turn. It was the ‘woke’ versus the newly awake.  You might call it the COVID-(16)19 effect” (p. 5).  This is appalling apparent when, for example,  you learn that the National Archives warns on-line viewers interested in copies of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, only to be “met with a warning—right at the top of each document—that says ‘Harmful Language Alert’” (p. 14).  Tellingly, when Joe Biden entered the White House he “abolished the ‘1776 Commission’—a last-ditch effort created by President Donald Trump to reject the 1619 narrative and reinstall traditional American history” (p. 36).

The battle taking place in America results Marxist-inspired movements determined to transform her.  Today’s Marxists want to control the culture and naturally target the nation’s schools.  They “control every strong point, every choke point, and every inch of high ground in the realm of American education, and by extension, American culture” (p. 27).  Powerful teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)—promote the Marxist agenda by imposing Critical Race Theory and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).  Amazingly, in 1972 the NEA hired Saul Alinsky to train its staff and issued a document—Alinsky for Teacher Organizers declaring “that teachers should be used to organize, not just for changes in the classroom, but for social change” (p. 37).  In addition to concerns for race, class, and gender, union bureaucrats want to “deconstruct” the nation’s history and constitutional principles.  For them, “our Western Judeo-Christian roots are the problem—they must be dismantled, one theory, one word, one classroom, and one mind at a time” (p. 32).  Thus, as former New York governor Andrew Cuomo said:  “We’re not going to make America great again, it was never that great.”  Cuomo’s view was evident in the “Common Core” curriculum prescribed for the nation’s schools a decade ago, pushing the historical positions of Howard Zinn’s A Popular History of the United States.  “It is not hyperbole to state,” Hegseth says, “that no other book has had a greater impact on the minds of American youth for the past forty years. When not assigned in classrooms, it has been fully incorporated into the mass-produced textbooks in our classrooms.  Zinn’s view of history is enmeshed in American classrooms. The unions love it, endorse it, and teach it” (p. 40).  Zinn openly espoused socialism and was patently anti-American.  To Hegseth, Zinn’s book was “written from the perspective of the Soviet Union” and designed to “make America look like an evil country.”  Tellingly, “ the NEA—the nation’s largest labor union—openly works hand in hand with the ‘Zinn Education Project’” (p. 40).  

Recognizing how the public schools have been radically transformed, Hegseth thinks classical Christian schools, implementing Western Christian Paideia (WCP), are much needed.  “Paideia, simply defined, represents the deeply seated affections, thinking, viewpoints, and virtues embedded in children at a young age, or, more simply, the rearing, molding, and education of a child.  Classical Christian education creates a paideia unique in all of human history—one that enables freedom” (p. 44).  Western Civilization, over the centuries, blended the best of Athens and Jerusalem, establishing a priceless heritage that must be recovered and celebrated.  Throughout the 20th century American Progressives rejected the Western Christian Paideia in order to establish a fully humanistic agenda, believing (in accord with Woodrow Wilson)  “that most people just needed a vocational education—they had no use for a free-man’s (classical) education” (p. 93).  Trained to get jobs rather than wisdom, students learned little of “divine Truth.”  C.S. Lewis saw this clearly a century ago, noting that, rightly defined, “education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves. . . . If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.” 

Hegseth confesses that he knew little about any kind of classical education.  “I am a graduate of two of the most ‘prestigious’ universities in America—Princeton and Harvard—yet I’ve never read most of the classics.  Homer or Virgil, Plato or Aristotle?  I’ve read next to nothing of them in school.  I don’t know a word of Latin or Greek, let alone really understanding the histories of Rome and Greece.  I never studied Shakespeare, and don’t think I ever experienced the Socratic method (except from my one conservative professor in college).  I never had my faith infused into my education; it was always just an accessory.  I can’t properly diagram a single sentence, and couldn’t tell you the difference between a verb and an adverb.  I write like I speak.  It just is what it is.  We were all failed by our government schools, and we didn’t even know it” (p. 246).  He now believes the nation needs Classical Christian schools which stress reason and virtue, wonder and beauty, believing that, as Aristotle said, “To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on virtue.”  This means students should memorize great poetry, study history and the Bible, and become open to the “stamp of beauty, timelessness, and culture on their soul” (p. 207).  This is best done by following the time-tested trivium (grammar, logic; rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy), and obtaining a working knowledge of Latin.  Above all, the Lord Jesus Christ must be honored and heeded.  

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Pete Hegseth recently published The War on Warriors:  Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2024;  Kindle Edition), a treatise that  is “closely tied” to his “Battle for the American Mind—because if we don’t stay free, then we’re just another country with a flag.  I won’t fight for just any flag, and I hope my kids would not either” (p. xix).   This book is a very personal manifesto designed to alert readers to worrisome changes taking place in America’s armed forces.  What he says is quite worth considering but not to be taken as the final word. Though Hegseth interviewed scores of veterans and active duty warriors, his book is more a jeremiad than an objective study (though he does cite documents including a 2024 report that declared:  “‘as currently postured, the U.S. military is at significant risk of not being able to defend America’s vital national interests.’  For the second year in a row, our military is rated as ‘weak’ relative to the force needed to defend national interests)” (p. xiv).  Rather than training warriors to fight, Hegseth thinks, “We’ve become a ‘You Be You’ military” (p. xvi).  The book’s epigram sets the tone:  “Proclaim this among the nations:  Consecrate for war; stir up the mighty men.  Let all the men of war draw near; let them come up.  Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weak say, “I am a warrior” (Joel 3: 9–10; ESV).

After graduating from Princeton University and getting a cushy job in a Wall Street financial firm, Bear Stearns, Hegseth joined the Army in 2001, responding to the Islamic jihadists’ attacks on  9/11.   He became an officer and “led men in combat in Iraq in 2005.  I pulled bodies out of burning vehicles in Afghanistan in 2012.  I held a riot shield outside the White House in 2020.” (p. xi). “  Despite his years of service—and because of his conservative views expressed on Fox News—he fell afoul the Army brass and would be branded, in 2021, an “extremist!”  The fact that a few veterans were part of the January 6 occupation of the Capitol led the Biden administration to investigate “extremism” in the military, finding “only 100 cases of extremist activity among 2.1 million active and reserve forces, ‘a case rate of .005 percent’” (p. 23).  In fact, the U.S. military is the least racist, least sexist, most equitable institution in America!  The armed forces have become “woke” in part because they have followed Barack Obama’s injunction to “fundamentally transform America.”  Under Obama for eight years (plus four more under Biden), “the pipelines of future military leaders have been primed with social justice, politically correct parrots.  Parrots who love “firsts” instead of fighters.  Parrots who will spout ‘our diversity is our strength’ when they know damn well that it’s the opposite in the military:  our unity is our strength.  They are dangerous idiots, and they are in charge” (p. 29).  In Hegseth’s view:  “You don’t ‘fundamentally transform’ something or someone you love; you transform something you disdain” (p. xvi).

Because the military has lost its way there’s a recruiting crisis in America.  Though three-fourths of American youth can’t qualify for military service—largely because they’re not physically fit—the recruitment problem is largely a morale issue.  Good soldiers, fed up with identity politics, are leaving and their replacements cannot be found.  Leftists have infiltrated and now control the upper echelons of the armed services, turning them into social justice bureaucracies providing employment opportunities for various minority groups.  Presiding over the system are the general officers who covet promotions rather than leading disciplined bands of warriors. Such officers know how to cultivate powerful politicians but fail to to endear themselves to enlisted men. “Hunting for racism, today’s generals create racial strife.  Pushing for gender equality, today’s generals weaken unit readiness.  Rooting out ‘extremism,’ today’s generals push rank-and-file patriots out of their formations (I’m one of them)” (p. 10).  An “unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington” (p. 11).  By focusing on internal DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) issues our military forces have compromised their fighting ability.  A Special Forces officer—one of the “dozens and dozens” he interviewed—told Hegseth:  “‘The current state of the military is careerism.  It no longer centers on our core task:  to win wars.  Indeed, the ethos is:  Where’s my next command?  How am I going to advance myself?’” (p. 37).   While Joe Biden was Commander in Chief, careerist ‘generals “have ceded ground—or outright defeat—on every contested battlespace with a foreign adversary.” (p. 36).  

Much that’s wrong with today’s armed forces can be traced to their “(Deadly) Obsession with Women Warriors.”  Hegseth makes a “politically incorrect but . . . perfectly commonsensical observation:  Dads push us to take risks.  Moms put the training wheels on our bikes.  We need moms.  But not in the military, especially in combat units” (p. 66).  Though individual women may be amazing “warriors” they are definitely exceptions.  There’s a simple explanation for this—an “average man’s upper-body strength is greater than that of 99 percent of women” (p. 73).  Facing this reality, the military has either  lowered its standards to make sure women could qualify or established different standards for the two sexes.  For example:  “the minimum standard of push-ups for a female in the Army, age twenty-two to twenty-six, is eleven” (p. 84).  Women get preferential treatment in order to place them in combat units—including the Army Ranger and Marine infantry units.  So the Army’s Airborne School no longer requires a daily five-miles run and now busses students to jump sites since too many women were getting injured.  Basically, “physical standards have gone completely out the window” because “women really struggle on the most basic tasks.” Our “warriors” are getting “fatter and slower”  (p. 87).  

Hegseth’s also worried about the state of our military academies.  Over the years, and for various reasons, they changed as an increasing number of “civilian professors” were hired—“for reasons of ‘diversity’”—and “with them came the predictable, radical, left-wing educational philosophies” (p. 210).  Thus “LTG Darryl Williams, then the superintendent at West Point, released a five-year plan that focused on ‘inclusivity’ as equal in importance as marksmanship under fire” (p. 215).  We now have rules of engagement written for warriors by lawyers, special treatment for homosexuals and transexuals, and a Supreme Court justice (Elena Sagan) renowned for her anti-military views.  

“America today is in a cold civil war.  Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals” who “wish to erode our institutions by making us question our purpose.  They seek to make us believe that everything we have is somehow taken from other people’s efforts, other people’s possessions. Stolen land! Patriarchy!  Racism!  . . . . That America is not that great; was never great.  And, for the purposes of this book, that the US military is a tool for conquest, imperialism, and oppression” (p. 205).  To awaken us to this threat—and to enlist us in resisting it—makes The War on Warriors worth heeding. 

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All I know about sailing I learned by reading Rick Kennedy’s latest book, Winds of Santa Ana:  Pilgrim Stories of the California Bight (Eugene, OR:  Wipf & Stock, c. 2022).  But I learned much more than how to steer a boat, for the book is a wide-ranging meditation on history and theology and what it means to be a thoughtful Christian.  I first read it as a manuscript worthy of scholarly attention.  My second reading was devotional, perusing short sections each day to meditate and pray.  As Donald Yerxa says:  “Kennedy is not only a gifted academic historian, he is also a pilgrim-sailor with the head of a philosopher, the heart of a Christian mysticism and the soul of a poet.  These traits are wonderfully on display in this imaginative and enchanting book. . . .  Winds of Santa Ana nurtures the spiritual imagination.  It is a book for those longing for a thicker description of nature, the past, and life than the reductive methodologies of the modern academy offer.”   

The California “Bight” is the California coast extending from San Diego north to Santa Barbara.  “The cartography and collective histories of this coast and the islands it embraces point to a unifying character, a cultural identity, and underlying ecology.”  Knowing it intimately, Kennedy says:  “It is hard to be an atheist here.  Notions of purposeless have to struggle in a place so beautiful.  The California Bight is distinctly revelatory, sacramental, and hopeful” (p. 1).  Reared in California (admitting that while he lives in San Diego where he teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University “Santa Barbara has my heart”),   Kennedy loves the Bight and named the sailboat he acquired in 1979 “Pilgrim.”  Early on he loved to sail off the coast of Santa Barbara and he “spontaneously and willingly accepted my position in the world.  I am a child of this coast, these islands, and these waters.  The Mexican Californios called themselves Los Hijos del Pais, Children of this place.  Sailing across the Santa Barbara Channel I embraced my home.  I am a child of this coast and these islands, Un Nino de la Costa y las Islas” (p. 115).  

At the same time he read two of St Bonaventure’s works—The Life of Saint Francis and The Soul’s Journey into God.  These 13th century classics became for him “a pilgrim manual for life in general and sailing in particular” (p. 3).  (Years later he acquired a bigger boat and named it Boethius, signaling his love for the author of The Consolation of Philosophy, who “understood the Creator as the whole fullness of boundless life” (p. 37).  Reading St. Bonaventure (the patron saint of Ventura, CA) and “sailing in the Santa Barbara Channel, I found myself becoming a type of Protestant-evangelical-Franciscan-pilgrim-sailor-ecologist” (p. 3).  With Bonaventure he thinks:  “Every creature is by its nature a kind of effigy and likeness of the eternal wisdom.”  So carefully observing and pondering the natural world enables him to consider what it all ultimately points to, what it reveals about God and man.  Still more:  the art of sailing is an “intricate craft that entangles persons, boat, wind, water and sky in ways that reveal there are no sharp distinctions between the physical and spiritual, the visible and invisible” (p. 8).  

Sailing along the California Bight brings one face-to-face with the reality that it “is a wilderness only superficially civilized.  The whole of sailing, if one is willing to accept it, is a wild conversation with creation, and through creation with the Creator.  I like sailing alone, but as a pilgrim-sailor on Boethius, I never feel alone when sailing” (p. 18).  He sails expecting to hear from the birds and fish, the details of the coast, the shifts in the wind, and the history of the place.  “Sailing is an obedience-skill.  The goal is not to triumph over the elements.  The goal is to find one’s proper place within them.”  Accordingly:  “Wisdom is not marching to one’s own drummer.   Wisdom senses when to submit and when to assert, when to be passive and when to act, when to add on sails and when to shorten, reef, and hunker down.”  Importantly:  “There is no sailing ‘my own way.’  There is only submission to the music of the spheres” (p. 83).  

While sailing along the coast Kennedy ponders the significant role religion has played in Southern California.  He writes warmly of the Catholic missions—this is a “crusader coast” and her residents are inevitably “entangled in Spain’s best sense of itself as a missionary empire,” and the chain of Spanish missions established by Father Junipero Serra have left important vestiges of Catholicism along the coast.  Various Protestant churches have also flourished therein.  More than a century ago Fundamentalists such as Lyman Stuart laid the foundations for both the Fundamentalist movement and what ultimately became Biola University.  The Evangelicalism that emerged following WWII was deeply influenced by Fuller Seminary, and Campus Crusade got its start in a Sunday school class in Hollywood Presbyterian Church.  Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel helped inspire the “Jesus People” who shaped a whole generation of young believers in the 1970s.  Deeply read in Church history, Kennedy finds much to praise in the movements rooted in the California Bight.  In fact:  “To live on the California Bight is to be constantly evangelized.  Christian history, patron saints, stories of signs and wonders surround us” (p. 87).  Still more:  “That the Southern California coast seems to have an outsized role in the global history of the twentieth-century Christianity fascinates me” (p. 180).  

Winds of Santa Ana is a deeply personal, profound work, rooted in the importance of Testimony.  It’s also an illustration of a gifted historian’s concern to get at the Truth of history where autobiography and historical analysis intersect.  In the words of a mutual friend, Kay Harkins:  “To sail into the waters of Rick Kennedy’s memoir, Winds of Santa Ana, is to voyage with a most affable, engaging captain.  Part philosopher, part sage, part poet, Kennedy approaches his audience as a friend in his invitation to apprehend rich interior and exterior seas and landscapes.”  

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Whereas Rick Kennedy recently pondered historical and philosophical issues evident to him while sailing in Winds of Santa Ana, he’d earlier found equally valuable lessons while mountain climbing. In Jesus, History, and Mt. Darwin: An Academic Excursion (Eugene, Oregon: WIPF & STOCK, c. 2008)—which I re-read while preparing this review—he invited readers to join him in thinking about the disciplines of history and theology while hiking in California’s Sierra Nevadas.  The book is by design a very personal account:  “Back in the 1970s, I learned to love university life.  I eventually became a professor of history.  I started out a Bible-trusting Christian and have not lost my faith.  This book is about the reasonableness of biblical Christianity in universities.  By reasonableness, I mean the warranted credibility, if not the persuasiveness, of Christian claims about ancient history” (p. 1).                                                              In  the mountains Kennedy sought to differentiate “natural history” from the “ancient history” Herodotus and Thucydides pursued.  Too often “natural history,” following the lead of Charles Darwin, has disdained biblical accounts, inferring that since “the creation of new species did not need God, then it is best to assume that God was not involved” (p. 1).  Darwin’s theory may very well illuminate certain aspects of natural history, but it should never displace Christian history, for there’s “a sharp, ineradicable difference between studying pre-historical rocks and human history preserved in documents.”  Throughout his distinguished career Kennedy has sought the proper way to research and reason, to think and write and teach history—especially as it comes to bear on the Christian Tradition.  In fact:  “For Christianity, history is primal” (p. 1).  Relying on history as a way to understand important truths leads us to Aristotle, who insisted we learn about the past from witnesses just as truly as we learn biology by examining specimens in laboratories.  “For Aristotle, jurisprudence and history were awkward disciplines that depended on listening to and reading outside sources” (p. 31).  His views on this were set forth in his “Topics.  This tool in the Aristotelian pocketknife is crucial for Christianity’s place in modern universities and was part of Aristotelian thinking most used by New Testament authors—especially Luke and Paul” (p. 32).  Kennedy shares John Henry Newman’s view:  “Is not the being of a God reported to us by testimony, handed down  by history, inferred by an inductive process, brought home to us by metaphysical necessity, urged on us by the suggestions of our conscience?”                                                                                                Above all historians listen!  They’re not novelists or politicians interested in imagining how things might be.  They’re not mathematicians, following the logic of their intuitions.  Historians must try to see what’s written in documents, listening to testimonies concerning what happened in days gone by.  “Jesus, in Luke 8:18, told his disciples to “consider carefully how you listen.”  He wasn’t endorsing skepticism as did Descartes, looking for reasons to doubt what’s written.  He, like Aristotle, “believed truth is stronger than error” and that it carries with it a certain persuasive quality.  “Truth is not beyond human nature,” he said,  “and men do, for the most part, achieve it.”  We rightly believe what we hear when it’s reasonable, not when it’s beyond disproof.  We rightly believe things actually happened because trustworthy witnesses say so.  “In practice, historians have to trust more than doubt.  In practice, historians, especially ancient historians, can’t rely on doubting.  Historians have to be close listeners” (p. 68).                                             This means Christian historians must acknowledge they don’t have “the knife-blade precision of controlled, repeatable experiments or the screwdriver leverage of geometrical demonstrations.  By the high standards of scientific precision or by high  standards of philosophy, we don’t ‘know’ historical people—be they Jesus or Caesar Augustus—really.  However, by the practical standards of history, we know about Jesus as much, probably more, than we know about most ancient people, even Caesar Augustus” (p. 69).  Too many “biblical” scholars, seeking to locate the “historical Jesus,” end up creating a Jesus who looks very much like themselves!  That’s because they lack the humility to actually listen to Him as revealed in New Testament documents.  They fail to live up to the dictum of Cicero, who insisted historians must, above all, tell the truth.  “For Cicero and Roman education in general, the historian is rooted in reported facts, actual chronology, real geography.  The historian is not a novelist, is not even a public-policy advocate.  The historian is a truth-teller whose speech is plain and purpose clear” (p. 77).                   Christians are blessed to have truth-telling historians in Church history who give them good reason to trust the New Testament.  Consider Eusebius, the first great historian who wrote The History of the Church in the 4th century.  “Historians of ancient Rome are still amazed by the breadth and quality of Eusebius’ analysis of ancient texts and collation of ancient chronology.  Eusebius relied on primary sources such as Polycarp, who in the 2d century testified that he “was not only instructed by apostles” but also talked with “many who had seen the Lord.”  Eusebius was one of the great scholars in the Roman Empire:  a Christian who ‘regarded the Bible as key to a correct understanding of human history’” (p. 80).   A few decades later Clement of Alexander talked with and took notes of what old men remembered, preserving “the true tradition of the blessed teaching straight from Peter, James, John, and Paul, the holy apostle, son receiving it from father.”  He and other scholars persuade Kennedy that “Our Bible is strong.  It is probably the most scholarly cared-for collection of texts to come to us from the Roman Empire” (p. 80).                       

In an interesting aside, Kennedy cites sentences from Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow wherein an elderly man said:  “History grows shorter.  I remember old men who remembered the Civil War.  I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old.  It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ.  Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light of the manger at Bethlehem.  So few remembers could sit down together in a small room.”  Eyewitnesses record what they saw.  Their accounts are considered trustworthy and are passed down through the generations.  There is every reasons to believe rather than distrust them.  So Kennedy concludes:  “A good and true story can be easily carried over hundreds of years by just a few people who want to tell a true story.”  Reports of miracles—and the absolutely essential miracles for Christians, the Resurrection—merit initial belief rather than skepticism.   Reasonable folks can rest easy when taking as true what has been “delivered to the saints.”            

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The importance of Testimony that underlies Rick Kennedy’s very personal, meditative works (Winds of Santa Ana and Jesus, History, and Mt. Darwin), was set forth in a thoroughly scholarly work entitled A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, c. 2004).   He considered “the deep traditional issues of testimony and authority in the art of reasoning” and segued into a discussion of their historical development.  To rightly reason on the basis of testimony and authority is no minor matter!  From Aristotle on, thinkers and teachers concerned with education took seriously the role of testimony and authority.  And inasmuch as Aristotle set forth many important definitions and distinctions in his Topics, we may take him as “The Philosopher” standing at the heart of the “classical tradition” so central to Western Civilization.                                                                             There’s a marked difference between what we “know from within ourselves and what we learn from others” (p. 13).  Gifted children quickly become proficient in mathematics, seeing clearly what simply must be true.  An adolescent can become a world-class mathematician or chess master, but few would want him to be the nation’s president!  That’s because the things we learn from others, such as history and wisdom, must develop throughout a life rightly lived and are learned through dialectic and rhetoric rather than logic and geometry.  “Aristotle ingeniously created an intellectual device that served this and other purposes. He called it topics” and it became basic to “the liberal arts curriculum for two thousand years” (p. 13).  Much that we learn, Aristotle insisted, comes from others by way of testimony and authority.  It is a form of “social” knowledge and is essential for “social” creatures such as ourselves.  Throughout the past, a multitude of thoughtful human beings have discovered truths regarding God, man, and the cosmos that we can quickly appropriate by believing them, accepting their authority.  He advocated the “a pattern of writing about testimony from the perspective of honest people giving and receiving the best information available to them” (p. 16).   Influential educators (especially Cicero and Quintilian in ancient Rome) simplified, synthesized and prescribed the principles set forth in Aristotle’s Topics.  Then Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus, preserved this tradition of carefully evaluating and trusting testimony and authority; their works were used in schools throughout the Middle Ages.  During the Reformation, Luther’s close associate Philipp Melanchthon “reached deeply into the works of Aristotle, Augustine, and the best Medieval theologians in order to strengthen not only the role of dialectic as the foundation to all aspects of the liberal arts curriculum but also as the foundation of  Christian reasonableness in general” (p. 117).                                                                                                   Things changed, however, when 17th century thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes charted new methodologies more amenable to the budding scientific approach that was concisely summed up in the newly-established Royal Society’s motto, “Nullius in verba” (On no one’s word).  Bacon specifically sought to dismiss Aristotle’s “common sense” philosophy, and Descartes endeavored to confine all knowledge to mathematical strictures.  Thus Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (along with Newton a co-founder of calculus) could imagine settling “all disputes” through “computation” (p. 197). In the hands of David Hume, this approach easily led to the denial of most all testimony—especially when applied to miracles.  Important textbooks, notably The Port-Royal Logic, certainly tried to maintain a balance between truths discerned mathematically and truths delivered through historical witnesses.  And gifted disciples of Aristotle, such as John Henry Newman, eloquently upheld his views and emphasized “the reasonableness of Christianity.” But during the past four centuries the measured rejection of Aristotle’s Topics is quite evident.  Consequently, C.S. Lewis’s lament in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (“Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”) describes the plight of modern education. Philosophers following Immanuel Kant reduced knowledge to what can be subjectively discerned. The autonomous self stands alone, determining what is true, or good, or beautiful. In America, John Dewey insisted one learns singularly through personal experience, through “doing.” Reflecting the influence of such thinkers, today’s teachers promote “Critical Thinking,” encouraging even the youngest scholars to stand defiantly alone and decide for themselves what is true or good or beautiful for them. Rarely are they taught to trust authorities or historical testimonies or “common sense” traditions.                         In the book’s final paragraphs Professor Kennedy reflects on his own intellectual pilgrimage.  Growing up in California in the 1960s, he embraced the bumper sticker philosophy: “Question Authority.”  Throughout his many years in school, culminating in his doctoral studies, he was urged to become an independent, “critical” thinker. Historians, he learned, were to be ever-vigilant, doubting rather than trusting sources, of “good teachers who modeled what they did not preach” (p. 310).  So he began to appreciate the wisdom of pre-modern thinkers such as Aristotle and Augustine.                                                                                           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *                                                Marvin Olasky, for nearly 30 years the editor of World magazine, offers us an instructive testimony in Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir . (Phillipsburg, N.J.:  P&R Publishing. Kindle Edition, c. 2024).  Reared in a nominally Jewish home, he rejected religion  soon after his his bar mitzvah and considered himself an atheist while in high school, where he found himself enthralled with journalism.  Off to Yale for undergraduate study, he wrote for the campus newspaper and joined like-minded rebels protesting the Vietnam War.  Having tread Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, he first aligned himself with leftists and ultimately  made “the worst decision of my life,” joining the Communist Party USA.  After various adventures and a failed marriage, Olasky decided to study for a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan before pursuing further journalistic goals.                                            

But unexpectedly, everything changed!  “Suddenly, without warning, on an ordinary day, figment becomes fact.  New thoughts bombard my brain:  What if Lenin is wrong?  Why am I sure that God does not exist?  Why have I turned my back on him? . . . .  For eight hours I sit in that chair, unwilling to move.  Every hour brings a glance at the clock and surprise that I am still stationary.  It’s hard for me to convey the strangeness, the otherness, of this experience.  No drugs, no dreams, just sitting in the chair, hour after hour, suddenly thinking Marxism is wrong.  At three o’clock I’m an atheist and a Communist.  At eleven p.m. I’m a believer in a God of some kind.  Hardly born again, but no longer dying.  At eleven, finally, I stand up, go outside, and wander around the cold and dark campus for the next two hours, trying to make sense of those eight hours.  . . . .   Years later I read in the Westminster Confession of Faith that God ‘is pleased, in His appointed and accepted time, effectually to call [some] by his Word and Spirit out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ” (pp. 52-53).                                                                                               

In time, Olasky and his wife Susan moved to Texas, where he has taught journalism at the University of Texas, becoming a tenured professor in 1987.  They and their children are active in a local church and work together supporting pro-life endeavors.  He also wrote “a book, Prodigal Press, that begins a long march to reform journalism.  I see opportunity for a middle road between an ‘objectivity’ that pretends neither God nor natural law exists and a subjectivity that exalts individual opinion and deduction over facts on the ground and induction” (p. 77).  His opportunity to implement his philosophy came when he became editor of World, endeavoring to bring a Christian perspective to the news.  He also wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion, arguing that churches do a better job in caring for the needy than the government.  This brought him to the attention George W. Bush, who asked him to serve as an ill-fated advisor in his administration.  Looking back, Olasky’s profoundly “grateful that God exists and Christ’s resurrection is a reality that provides hope as death approaches” (p. 160).  Readable and worth reading!