No 20th century thinker impacted me more than C.S. Lewis.  In this I’m not alone!  In a recent interview with Dean Nelson at Point Loma Nazarene University, NewYork Times columnist David Brooks said he received some 500 books when folks realized he was interested in Christianity.  Probably 300 of them, he said, were Mere Christianity, by Lewis!  When I was in high school one of my aunts, Edith Lantz, suggested I read Lewis, and subsequently he became a vital part of my life.  I frequently assigned Mere Christianity to classes I taught and I occasionally offered a reading seminar on Lewis.  Then I published two books on aspects of his thought—C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness and C.S. Lewis Explores Vice and Virtue.  In the former I noted that when Christianity Today listed the “Movers and Shapers of Modern Evangelicalism” it said Lewis was the author whose “books indisputably affected American evangelicals during this period more than  . . . .  any of the other authors mentioned.”  In a column entitled “The Oxford Prophet,” Charles Colson called Lewis is “a true prophet for our postmodern age.”  He deserved that label, Colson said, because he was so deeply immersed in history that he could incisively critique “the narrow confines of the world-view of his own age.”  He thought and wrote from within what he called “the great body of Christian thought down the ages.”  Lewis never claimed to be more than a “lay theologian.” but he sought to clearly explain traditional Christian beliefs, and his thoroughly grounded faith informed virtually all he wrote.  His was a thoroughly converted mind! 

Lewis stood within the Natural Law tradition, as was clearly evident in the first section of Mere Christianity, entitled “On Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” (originally a brief book consisting of 15 minute lectures he gave on BBC in 1941),  The fact that we make moral judgments points to the fact that God exists and requires righteous living.  So it’s revealing that C. S. Lewis, lecturing at the University of London, labeled himself a “middle-aged moralist,” testifying to the fact that his writings show a sustained concern for righteousness.  He thought he was called to remind us of “the primeval moral platitudes” we so routinely ignore.  He always wanted to uphold the philosophia perennis—the perennial philosophy shaped by Greek philosophers (Plato and Aristotle),  medieval theologians (Augustine and Thomas Aquinas), and Anglicans (Richard Hooker and Samuel Johnson).  These men blended moral realism, natural law, divine law, and the ethics of virtue into the central ethical tradition of Western civilization.  As his discerning contemporary Malcolm Muggeridge said, Lewis embodied integrity—a goodness “in his innermost being.  His teaching and his writing were his opus dei.”

Lewis feared that Western civilization was collapsing, so he sought to do battle for truth and justice, preserving the culture forged in Europe’s centuries-long struggle with barbarism.  In 1954 he moved from Oxford to Cambridge University, which had created a Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature for him.  Giving his inaugural Lecture (De Descriptione Temporum) he spoke from within what he called the “Old Western order” that significantly differed from modernity.  He was, in fact, something of a “live dinosaur” or ancient Athenian who could bear witness to distant eras.  In fact, he said, “ Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand.  I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners.”  But he could prove to be a useful “specimen,” providing insight into what the “old Western men” believed.  Thus, he said, “use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.”  That Old Western order clearly distinguished good from evil.  The modern world contained millions of people who were not more evil than folks in the past, but they increasingly refused to differentiate right from wrong, granting everyone the “right” to do what they please.  It just feels right to do so.  In the past, thinking, not feeling, set moral standards.  The “new morality” that would burst on the scene in the 1960s was a self-satisfying, feel-good morality.  To Lewis: “Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as men choose their clothes.”

Not long after delivering the BBC talks that became Mere Christianity Lewis was invited (in 1943) to give a lecture series at the University of Durham that would be titled, when published, The Abolition of Man.  It was praised by noted theologians, including Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI who noted its “keen accuracy”) and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who found its “taut brilliance” admirable.  It would be ranked among the 10 most influential non-fiction books of the 20th century by the National Review.  Having repeatedly re-read it, I consider it one of his most profound works, probably his best purely philosophical treatise, explaining much about the contemporary world. In his first lecture, “Men Without Chests,” Lewis analyzed a textbook widely used in England’s elementary schools.  It cited a well-known passage in Coleridge wherein two tourists responded differently to a waterfall; one called it “sublime” and the other found it  “pretty.”  The textbook’s authors declared:  “When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall . . .   Actually . . .  he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.”  Truth, to the extent there is truth, is purely subjective, found within the mind rather than the external world.  Then the authors added: “This confusion is continually present in language as we use it.  We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.”  But Lewis insisted:  “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.  The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others.  And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same.  The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.”  

Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all agreed:  a rightly educated person learns to see what’s good or true or beautiful in what we perceive.   In the moral life, Lewis said, there is what the Chinese call the Tao.  “It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road.  It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.  It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.  ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’  The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.  This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’”  These great ethical traditions share a commitment to “objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”  They have been variously called the Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes. They were set forth by some “wise men of old” whose main concern was “to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.”   It’s the Tao, and it’s “not one among a series of possible systems of value.  It is the sole source of all value judgements.  If it is rejected, all value is rejected.  If any value is retained, it is retained.  The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.”  The architects of these traditions believed in the propagation of received wisdom, whereas the modern educators—the “innovators” in Lewis’s view—engaged in propaganda that produces “Men without Chests.”  Sadly, Lewis concluded:  “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Embracing this modern philosophy of education would, in the long run, destroy society.  Without objective values widely acknowledged and followed there would be the cascading chaos of everyone doing whatever feels good.  And indeed, within 30 years young folks—the ‘60s generation—spoke for the counterculture by declaring “if it feels good do it!”  It’s not what’s good that I want—it’s what I want that’s good!  Such persons would be promoting, Lewis predicted in his third lecture, “The Abolition of Man.”  Without adhering to the Tao, people would differ in their views of what is truly “good,” and inevitably those with power would tell others what to do.  In our increasingly technological world (a world Lewis disliked in many ways) the machines empower their developers.  As we impose our wills on Nature, and “if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized,” the result will be “the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.”  Tragically:  “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.  The battle will then be won.”

Writing these lectures Lewis could not have foreseen the success of today’s transgender advocates.  Men not only claim to be women but are supported by powerful cultural institutions in so doing!  They have repudiated the very notion of human nature!  But Lewis asserted:  “Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own `natural’ impulses.  Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike.  A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”  And though dictators and totalitarian regimes illustrate this quite clearly Lewis warned that:   “many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany.  Traditional values are to be `debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.” 

Only a recovery of the Tao, only a restoration of traditional values, can save us from tyranny and destruction.  As of now the folks Lewis feared are in control of our world, creating the chaos portrayed in his dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength.  

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In The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis set forth persuasive philosophical answers to human suffering.  But when his wife Joy died he had to deal with it in a deeply personal way.  He recorded his struggles in some notebooks that were later published as A Grief Observed (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, c. 1961, 1996).  His words helped me deal with my own grief; I have re-read the book many times and recommended it to others, for it more accurately describes what I’ve felt than anything I’ve read or can say.  In his “Introduction” to the book, Lewis’s step-son, Douglas Gresham, notes:  “This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane.  It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm the fortress” (p. xxvi).  Pious rhetoric fails in such moments, and Jesus’ words on the Cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”—sound more truthful than “God is good, all the time”!  

 “Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis wondered.  “This is one of the most disquieting symptoms” (p. 5).   If he’d hoped God would emotionally embrace and comfort him, such was not the case.  “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly.  Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively.  But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand” (p. 25). “What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. [referring to Joy] and I offered and all the false hopes we had” (p. 30).  “Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’  In one sense that is most certain.  She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable” (p. 24).  Perhaps, Lewis thought, “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was.  I mistook clouds of atoms for a person” (p. 28).  But he could never confuse mind with molecular motion, agreeing with a great neuroscientist, John Eccles, who said:  “We are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world” (p. 29). 

An unexpected consequence of his suffering, Lewis noted, is “the laziness of grief” (p. 5).   Indeed:  “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable” (p. 28).  “And grief still feels like fear.  Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense.  Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.  It gives life a permanently provisional feeling.  It doesn’t seem worth starting anything.  I can’t settle down.  I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much.  Up till now I always had too little time.  Now there is nothing but time.  Almost pure time, empty successiveness” (p. 33).  “The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away, but what will follow?” he wonders.  “Just this apathy, this dead flatness?  . . . .  Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?” (p. 36).  It’s enervating.  There’s a strange ennui, a disinterest in doing anything beyond necessary daily tasks.   

Lewis often wondered at the mysterious one-flesh nature of Christian marriage.  Male and female are, by nature, somewhat at odds.  “Marriage heals this.  Jointly the two become fully human.  ‘In the image of God created he them.’  Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.  And then one or other dies” (p. 49).    There is a literal truth to this conjugal union that one realizes when the bond is broken and part of you departs.  So:  “There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’  You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain” (p. 13).  Only Joy had to suffer the interminable treatments.  Only she knew the inescapable depression of unanswered prayers and failed procedures.  “I had my miseries,” he said, “not hers; she had hers, not mine.  The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine.  We were setting out on different roads” (p. 13).  Different roads:  hers to Glory; his through Gethsemane.  

“If, as I can’t help suspecting,” Lewis says, “the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.  It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.  It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.  We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here.  Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves through the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love” (p. 50).  How helpful this is!  To imagine that separation is but another step in the dance of love—a process divesting one of self-absorption while focusing (primarily through grief) upon the lover—is worth pondering.  Lewis also wondered about the sanctifying aspects Joy’s suffering, when “month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel while she wore it” (p. 42).  “The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness” (43).  He then compared God to a loving surgeon who insists on operating, at considerable pain to the patient, in order to ultimately heal.  Nothing is more helpful (if hard to accept) than this:  God wills our good—our holiness—and certain processes, sickness and death included, contribute to this good. 

Implicit in the well-intended but usually unwelcome “how are you doing?” inquiries is the assumption that you must soon “get over” the loss of your loved one.  As Lewis notes, “the words are ambiguous.  To say a patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg cut off is quite another.  After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies.  If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop.  Presently he’ll get his strength back and be able to stump about on his wooden leg.  He has ‘got over it.’  But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man.  There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it” (p. 52).  Lewis then notes the various things one continues to do while constantly sensing the loss of the limb.  “All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off.  Duties too.  At present I am learning to get about on a wooden leg.  But I shall never be a biped again” (p. 53).  What powerful analogies Lewis employs!  Many of us describe the loss of a spouse as an amputation.  But only Lewis has the skill to flesh out the comparison so as to enable one to see this.  “I shall never be biped again.”  How lamentably true.  

In time, Lewis sensed how rightly remembering his wife pointed him to God.  He had no “good” pictures of Joy, but at times he thought of her as a sword, because of her sharp mind.  At other times he compared her to a lush, nurturing garden.  “Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith.  To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful” (p. 63).   Ultimately:  “All reality is iconoclastic.  The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her.  And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness.  That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.  And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead” (p. 66).  Lewis interrogated himself, wondering if he loved Joy more than God or craved to see her more than Him hereafter.  He knew he must prefer God above all in order to attain his final end.  So he asked:  “Lord, are these your real terms?  Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?  Consider, Lord, how it looks to us” (p. 68).  He then noted that “Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged to never see her again.  I’d have had to.  Any decent person would” (p. 69).  That’s because, if the Gospel is true, Joy was alive and well, as never before, and he must rest content with the knowledge that her being is ever sustained by the “One in whom we live and move and have our being.”  

Describing one of his sudden awakenings to his late wife’s persisting presence, Lewis said:  “It’s the quality of last night’s experience—not what it proves but what it was—that makes it worth putting down.  It was incredibly unemotional.  Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own, not ‘soul’ as we tend to think of soul.  . . . .  Not at all like a rapturous reunion of lovers.  . . . .  Not that there was any ‘message’—just intelligence and attention.  No sense of joy or sorrow.  No love even in our ordinary sense.  No un-love.  I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so—well, so business-like.  Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy.  An intimacy that had not passed through the senses at all” (p. 73).  “Wherever it came from, “Lewis continued, “it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind.  The dead could be like this; sheer intellects” (p. 74).  He found he didn’t need emotional comfort.  “The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it” (p. 74).  Rather than being the nebulous, ethereal spirits portrayed in New Age materials, the departed are:  “Above all, solid.  Utterly reliable.  Firm.  There is no nonsense about the dead” (p. 75).  Indeed!  How good it is to imagine our departed loved ones as the substantial figures portrayed in Lewis’s incomparable The Great Divorce. 

# # #

In the final pages of The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton noted that Christianity is quite unique inasmuch as it has died several times and then, mysteriously, risen again.  “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died.  Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.  But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this:  that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top.  The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.”   At least “three or four times” in Church history “the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end.”  Whether studying the Arians or the French skeptics, the Albigensians or the Darwinists, “the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.”  But every time it was the dogs who died!  

“This is the final fact,” Chesterton wrote, “and it is the most extraordinary of all.  The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age.  It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end.”  Sometimes the death came violently, under intense persecutions.  “But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace.  It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender. “  It has survived because it is the bride of the Risen Lord Jesus, Who promised:  “‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’”  The ancient and medieval worlds have passed away.  Modernity may well be dying now and carrying Christendom with it.  But, Chesterton said, let not your heart be troubled!  The future may be surprisingly Christian—just not in the way we might imagine it.

Without forgetting Chesterton’s insights, we can now take seriously the plight of today’s Western Christian Church without losing hope in the ultimate triumph of her Redeemer.  While reading the latest sociological study by Christian Smith—Why Religion Went Obsolete:  The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 2025; Kindle Edition)—it’s important to remember such studies are snapshots of a current situation, not conclusive laments for a lost supernatural reality.  The data prove, Smith says, that “Americans have lost faith in traditional religion” (p. 1).  “Until the 1990s, traditional American religion appeared in many ways to be alive and well.”  Europe might have lost the Faith, but it thrived in America.  “No longer.  The tide has turned.  Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations, which means that—barring unlikely religious revivals among youth—the losses will not just continue but accelerate as less-religious younger Americans replace older more-religious ones and fewer and fewer American children are raised by religious parents” (p. 1).  These trends are especially evident in mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches.

The rapid loss of religious faith is the result of a cluster of “sociocultural developments” that have made traditional religion irrelevant and obsolete, says Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who excels in cranking out and analyzing the kinds of studies prescribed by his profession.  His data document what many of us have observed on a personal level—churches declining or closing, schools collapsing, anti-Christian polemicists and movements gaining traction.  The failure of the churches to appeal to young people is also quite evident.   Gen X (born 1965–1980) proved to be “the transitional hinge of cultural and religious change, breaking with the old order and signaling new directions.”  Millennials accelerated the process, and “Gen Z (born 1997–2012) is now carrying forward and working out the details of the new normal” (p. 12).  No matter how you measure it, younger people find religion less essential than their grandparents.  They may think religion is good if it encourages morality or psychological health or community service, but they don’t think it reveals any kind of Transcendent Truth.  Indeed, they seem uninterested in their souls’ condition or destination. 

Young people are, in fact, shaped by their culture.  Much that they think is scarcely reflective, much less logical.  The culture of relativism (famously identified by Pope Benedict XVI) now dominates their world.  It’s the zeitgeist within which they function—a worldview fed by a variety of cultural developments that seem to have little immediate bearing on religion.   Identifying these developments makes Smith’s work most valuable.  They include, first, “higher education for the masses.”  The more highly educated you are the less you will find religion necessary.  Statistically, college students turn away from their parents’ faith. Secondly, women entering the work force tended to take religion less seriously.  Thirdly, there was a serious erosion of traditional marriage and family.  Until the ‘70s “cohabitation was practically nonexistent,” but now it’s “not uncommon and largely accepted by the cultural mainstream” (p. 78).  Fourth, younger folks rarely join fraternal and civic organizations.  They’re less likely to join a church or civic club or a bowling league.  Fifth, they are embedded in a mass consumption culture, continually shopping and buying things.  Sixth, they’re poster children for “expressive individualism,” forever seeking “personal authenticity.”  To think of yielding one’s life to another person—or to an Ultimate Person—violates their desire for autonomy.  Seventh, they clearly have embraced much of postmodernism, including its epistemological skepticism and ethical relativism.  Eighth, they identify as “emerging adults” rather than fully formed grown-ups.  The data show significant numbers of them still living with their parents rather than setting up independent households.  

Smith thinks the year 1991—the end of the Cold War—marked  the beginning of religion’s collapse.  “The victory over godless communism that America and the West had achieved ‘by the grace of God’ would, ironically, result in an America with much less interest in God.  The end of the Cold War was a jolt that helped to trigger the cultural avalanche that plowed over religion in the next two decades” (p. 129).  A “new world order” emerged, establishing a “neoliberal capitalism” that required young folks to totally give themselves to careers.  This frequently meant going where the jobs were and leaving their childhood communities.  Working only for themselves, constantly competing to succeed, they were caught up in a very irreligious economic system.  Simultaneously they were immersed and in danger of drowning in the digital revolution.  Smith’s analysis of the impact of this revolution is perceptive and alarming, for it underlies many of the problems churches must confront.  The internet and cell phones transformed the culture in manifold ways, demanding large amounts of time and creating a virtual world that easily replaced the real one.  Contact with actual persons declined, as did attending religious services.  As one young person said:  “‘The reason for religion’s decline is pretty basic:  technology.  Our focus is just gone’” (p. 145).  

No sooner had the Cold War ended than a new war—a war on terror—erupted.  On September 11, 2001, militant Muslims destroyed the World Trade Towers in New York City and the world changed.  Unexpectedly, religion also changed, since Americans’ evaluations of religion shifted from seeing it as generally good to fearing it as a vehicle of violence.  Then an influential corps of “new atheists” persuaded their followers that all religions, Christianity as well as Islam, are by nature violent.   During the same decade a “third sexual revolution” challenged the traditional religions, normalizing non-marital activities.  Young women especially celebrated their freedom to be promiscuous, enjoying “friends with benefits” and “booty calls.”  Homosexual activities also gained significant social approval.  In 2001 a majority of Americans disapproved same-sex relationships, but by 2008 the tides had turned and a majority approved them.  By 2022 some 71% of the people found them “morally acceptable.”  By 2016, when the Supreme Court approved same sex marriage, a majority of Americans agreed.  Millennials especially support the LGBTQ+ agenda.  They also believe in and fear global warming.  Many suffer “climate grief” or “environmental nihilism.  Some have abandoned hope for the future, even despairing at bringing children into the world.  “An astounding 33% of Millennials believe that ‘Humanity is doomed,’ while 28% report that they feel a huge amount or a lot of ‘sadness, fear, anxiety, or anger over the climate crisis’” (p. 211).   

Amidst these developments during the initial decades of the 21st century, young Americans showed less and less respect for traditional religion.  Though  religion may have helped their parents be morally upright, they think it’s quite easy to be “good without God.”   Harvard University’s humanist chaplain, Greg Epstein, laid out this claim in a pivotal book entitled Good Without God:  What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.  Though the standards for goodness were quite low, “The insistence that people can be moral without religion was one of the most pervasive in our interviews.  A small sample:  ‘I found comfort going to church and learning things, but it’s not spiritually supportive of me anymore’” (p. 221).  A young woman felt “annoyed by the Ten Commandments“ inasmuch as she finds equally valid prescriptions in her own heart.  She, along with many of her generation, prefer to think of themselves as “spiritual” rather than religious and often join  the growing crowd of “nones” identifying as having no religion.  

Compounding the growing disaffiliation from traditional religions are an assortment of self-destructions littering the ecclesiastical scene.  “Beginning in the late 1980s, scores of public scandals rocked religious communities as religious leaders were exposed for having committed various sexual, financial, and other wrongdoings.  For more than two decades, scandals touched almost every religious tradition in the United States, demoralizing the faithful and disgracing leaders” (p. 229).  Horrendous sexual misbehavior (largely involving priests and young men) rocked the Roman Catholic Church.  Protestants and Jews suffered similar revelations.   Famous leaders were exposed, including Jean Vanier, the Catholic founder of L’Arche, who engaged in multiple sexual trysts, and John Howard Yoder, an influential Anabaptist theologian, who “sexually harassed, abused, and assaulted” some 100 women.  As Smith comments:  “The contrast between Yoder’s compelling call for Christian nonviolence and his practice of sexual abuse was stunning” (p. 240).  These seemingly endless scandals certainly played a major role in disillusioning anyone seriously considering religious claims, many of whom headed for church exits.

Winding up his presentation, Smith lists 34 items explaining the growing obsolescence of religion.  Many of them can be reduced to the Millennials’ widespread expressive individualism—everyone is unique, everyone must be celebrated, everyone’s values must be respected.  Self-awareness and self-development are highly prized.  You must constantly develop your self and resist any effort of others or (especially) institutions such as churches to shove you into a mold.  Only you know and can appropriate the truths that are right for you.  Live for the day.   YOLO—“you only live once.”  If religion helps you in your development embrace it.  But don’t dare suggest it’s valuable for others—and, above all, don’t be judgmental.  Summing up (with myself adding bold face to the main points):  “In heart and soul, as a matter of deep culture, the Millennial zeitgeist was (and seems to remain):  Immanent:  Focused on the here and now, not the transcendent or otherworldly; Individualistic:  Envisioning society as a collection of atomistic, choice-making selves;  Anti-institutional:  Avoiding structured social groups and institutions;  Presentist:  Captive to the contemporary, unmoored from history and tradition;  Relativist:  Viewing knowledge, truth, and ethics as opinions dependent on perspectives;  Distrustful:  Suspicious of most people’s and organization’s motives and agendas; Subjectivist:  Assuming interior feelings and experience to be the best guides for living; Anti-authority:  Hostile to structured social roles of influence and power;  Fluid: Expecting change, instability, revision, mobility; Multicultural:  Comfortable with sociocultural diversity, dubious of homogenous groups; Minimalist:  Preferring to strip away unnecessary systems, particularities, creeds;  Transgressive:  Breaking down received boundaries, norms, categories, decorum; Pornographic:  Inundated by images of nudity, sex, and violence of all sorts in most media; Jaded:  Bored by hype and defeated by disappointment, scandals, and dim futures; Consumerist:  Conceiving the good life as continually acquiring new experiences and products; Entertained:  Soaking up relentless stimulation, amusement, performance, spectacle; Re-enchanted:  Open to believing “weird” stuff that enlightened modernity had suppressed” (p. 336).  Dealing with this zeitgeist, Smith acknowledges that churches find themselves in “no-win situations.  When religion seriously accommodated pluralism, it became milquetoast.  When it proclaimed a distinctive message, it was narrow-minded” (p. 367).  

Reading Smith’s treatise, I was impressed with his wide-ranging scholarship and commitment to making clear the state of religion in America.  Yet it seems to me it is as much a commentary on our culture as our religion.  We need to recognize, as Alistair MacIntyre insisted in After Virtue, that we are witnessing the triumph of barbarism.  Thus there is an alarming decline in the quality or education—as pointed out by in Every One Must Have a Prize, by Melanie Phillips.  There is a similar decline of standards in music and art.  Smith certainly acknowledges that the obsolescence of religion has taken place in a withering culture, but much apart from the church has also become obsolete.  Classical languages, meaningful grammar, literary masterpieces, and logic share that demise.  

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That religion may, in fact, not be obsolete is evident in Charles A. Murray’s recent Taking Religion Seriously (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2025; Kindle Edition).  Murray is a controversial political scientist well-known for such treatises as Losing Ground and The Bell Curve.  He made headlines when he was Invited to speak in Middlebury College in 2017.  Students protested and prevented him from delivering his speech.  He then made a video of the address and tried to leave the campus, only to be physically attacked by protesters.  Though he was not injured, a professor accompanying him was seriously injured, suffering a concussion.  A committed libertarian, Murray was, for much of his life, a religious skeptic.  Then his wife, overwhelmed by the beauty of bearing a child, developed an interest in a world rooted in something bigger than herself.  “Her epiphany was that she loved [her daughter] Anna ‘far more than evolution required’” (p. 7).  That led her to link up with The Society of Friends (Quakers) and cultivate a more spiritual life.  Her interests prodded Murray to become more open-minded to religious claims, and this brief book charts his journey during the past two decades.

Though he attended a Presbyterian church as a child, Murray abandoned any religious life while earning degrees from Harvard and MIT.  Without serious thought he simply embraced what he calls “Western modernity” with its deeply irreligious assumptions.  He now knows that these assumptions were unreflective and deeply flawed.  “I had not investigated the factual validity any of those propositions.  They were part of the received wisdom of most Western intellectuals throughout the twentieth century.  I accepted them without thinking” (p. 22).  He assumed science had rendered belief in God irrational, that earth is a tiny speck in a vast universe, and man is simply a sophisticated animal.  No enlightened thinker believed in the soul and there was certainly no life beyond the grave.  “The great religious traditions are human inventions,” Murray believed, “natural products of the fear of death.  That includes Christianity, which can call on no solid evidence for its implausible claims” (p. 21).  But late in life —in the 1990s—he started to question these assumptions, beginning with the eerie conjunction of mathematics and Reality demonstrated by thinkers such as Newton, Boyle, and Einstein.  “The relationship of mathematics to reality has generated shelves of books of which I was entirely ignorant (and remain nearly so).  But even at my elementary level, it just seemed extremely odd that so many basic phenomena were so mathematically simple. It was almost as if someone had planned it that way” (p. 23).  If so, who is that someone?  He also began to appreciate the importance of human consciousness, the possibility that we have souls.  Strict materialists cannot explain the way we think.  Though great advances have been made in understanding the brain, there is something more than matter-in-motion when we think.  Perhaps, he came to see, there is a non-material realm to our awareness of our world.  

Then a friend of his, Charles Krauthammer, asked him, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  Though this is a truly ancient philosophical question, Murray had never seriously pondered it!  He’d never read Plato and Augustine, Aristotle and Aquinas!  “When I had thought about the existence of the universe at all, I had taken it as a given.”  Case closed!  But perhaps not!  The more he actually thought about it the more he took “the issue seriously.  Why is there anything?  Surely things do not exist without having been created.  What created all this?  If you haven’t thought about it recently, this is a good time to stop and try to come up with your own answer” (p. 24).  Perhaps there is, as Aristotle said, an “unmoved Mover.”  Next, coming to terms with the scientific evidence for a moment of singularity, he began studying current materials regarding the “big bang.”  Literally, in a milli-second, everything came into being.  “Sometime in the early 2000s,” says Murray, “I did have a road-to-Damascus moment, but it was empirical rather than spiritual.  I decided that the entity that I might as well call God had deliberately designed the universe to permit the existence of life.  It was a case of reading a relatively small number of pages of text and saying to myself, “I can’t believe I’m thinking this, but it’s the only plausible explanation” (p. 29).  He had to rethink everything.  While pondering the evidence presented in a book titled Just Six Numbers, he concluded he “had no choice” but to acknowledge “that a God created a universe that would enable life to exist” (p. 44).  

Intellectually persuaded that God exists, Murray began to consider Christianity.  He’d already been impressed by great Christian thinkers and artists while writing Human Accomplishment, published in 2003.  Fortuitously, two years later an Evangelical friend suggested he read C.S. Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity, which helped him move from acknowledging a transcendent Moral Law to accepting its Author.  Strengthening his case, in The Abolition of Man, “Lewis discusses how the Moral Law raises an issue that cuts across religions and philosophic systems:  the doctrine of objective value, “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (p. 148).  That we can’t construct our own morality seemed manifestly true. Trying to do so had collapsed our culture.   “I was born in 1943,” he says, “and have witnessed 180-degree flips in the secular received wisdom on child-rearing, marriage, divorce, euthanasia, abortion, acceptable public behavior, responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, and virtually everything about human sexuality.  Many of these changes do not appear to have been for the better.  Doesn’t the evanescence of moral principles in the present age suggest a special need to seek moral bedrock?” (p. 151).  There is, of course, a lengthy list of thoughtful folks who have been intellectually challenged and moved by the works of Lewis.  Murray is simply one of the latest, and notably prominent, thinkers to acknowledge him.

Subsequently, Murray began to consider the truthfulness of the Gospels, which he’d earlier considered fictional.  It became clear to him that the “lives of Jesus” constructed by biblical critics revealed much about themselves but not much about Jesus.  The more he studied the primary texts in the New Testament the more he came to believe in their accuracy.  He devoured a great historical work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:  The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, by Richard Bauckham, and came to share his high regard for the authenticity and trustworthiness of the New Testament.  Miracles, especially Christ’s Resurrection, became credible.  This didn’t make him a believer, but it did establish a solid foundation for belief.  

He’s still a seeker, but he’s come to believe that much that religion holds may very well be true. 

In graduate school one of my five fields of study was ancient and medieval history.  That equipped me to teach church history, and I maintain a genuine interest in the subject.  Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is one of the classic ancient texts, and of the best recent works I’ve read explores the parallel lives of two monumental men in Fatal Discord:  Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2018; Kindle Edition), by Michael Massing.  Desiderius Erasmus (the Christian humanist and biblical scholar) and Martin Luther (the Protestant reformer) were contemporaries, and Massing tells their stories with journalistic skill, putting the two men’s stories in chronological, alternating chapters.  Doing so enables him to provide illumination on their tumultuous era and insight into ours, for:  “These two schools remain with us today.  The conflict between Erasmus and Luther marks a key passage in Western thinking—the point at which these two fundamental and often colliding traditions took hold.  The struggle between them continues to shape Western society.  On one side are Erasmus-like humanists: seekers of concord, promoters of pluralism, believers in the Bible as a fallible document open to multiple interpretations, and advocates of the view that man is a fully autonomous moral agent.  On the other are Lutheran-style evangelicals who seek a direct relationship with God, embrace faith in Christ as the only path to salvation, accept the Bible as the Word of God, and consider the Almighty the prime mover of events” (p. xiii). 

Erasmus was a Dutchman born out of wedlock in 1467 in Rotterdam.  He attended a renowned Latin school in Devanter where both Geert Groote and Thomas a Kempis had studied.  The latter’s Imitation of Christ prescribed the Devotio Moderna, an important “reform movement” calling for a vibrant relationship with God through pious practices.  But what most impacted Erasmus at Deventer was the classical literature of Rome (Terrence, Horace, Virgil) so central to the humanistic Renaissance.  He would find in Petrarch an example of “critical textual editing” that he would apply to biblical studies.  Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany, in 1483, the son of a miner who became prosperous enough to provide his son with a solid education, initially designed to enable him to become a lawyer.  At the University of Erfurt Luther encountered the philosophical works of William of Ockham, absorbing his nominalism and rejecting the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, who was deeply influenced by Aristotle.  Accordingly, Luther despised Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, calling it “‘the worst of all books’ and charging that it ‘flatly opposes divine grace and all Christian virtues.’  Luther’s great revolt would spring in part from his fierce reaction to this work” (p. 82). 

After earning his doctorate in theology Erasmus became an itinerant scholar, publishing a number of works that made him a celebrated figure in Europe.  He was especially interested in “exploring the fathers” of the Early Church such as Jerome and translating their works.   In 1500 A.D. he published his first book, Collected Adages—an assortment of quotations (with commentary) from Plato, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and others.  He also began to study Greek, determined to read the New Testament in its original language, and would in time publish his enormously influential Greek New Testament text, with extensive annotations, many of which questioned traditional doctrines.  “Erasmus’s text would become the foundation for all Western scholarship on the Greek New Testament for the next three centuries” (p. 255).  Though conventionally religious, Erasmus was above all a Christian Humanist, impressed with man’s innate abilities and convinced that he could work out his own salvation in communion with God.  

At the same time Luther (in 1505) abruptly decided to pursue the religious life in an Augustinian monastery after surviving a traumatic moment in a thunderstorm.  The monastic life failed to resolve his spiritual disquiet, but he was encouraged to become a priest and ultimately earned a doctorate in theology.  Deeply troubled by his understanding of the justice of God—justitia Dei—he never felt righteous enough to please Him.  Teaching at a new university in Wittenberg, Luther began studying and lecturing on the Bible.  He was especially drawn to the Psalms, and while reading Psalm 85 he awakened to the fact that “it was not because Christ did righteous deeds that he was righteous; rather, it was because he was righteous that he did righteous deeds.  The same was true of man.  A person cannot be righteous simply because he behaves in an upright fashion.  He must first become righteous; virtuous deeds will then follow.  Luther was here turning Aristotle on his head.  In the Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek philosopher had proposed that man becomes good by doing good deeds; it is through his moral conduct that he shows he is a moral person.  For Luther, one must first become a righteous person; righteous deeds will then follow.  In these rough notes on the Psalms, one can see the foundations of Western Christianity beginning to shift” (p. 190).  Soon thereafter, studying Romans, he found that the Gospel shows that “the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’”  Luther felt born again!  Righteousness comes from God as a gift of faith. We are justified by faith alone!

Massing ably retells Luther’s role in birthing the Protestant Reformation.  And he rightly sets forth the inevitable conflict between the common sense reforms proposed by Erasmus and the radical theological views of Luther, including the positions that:  “‘Free will collapses, good works collapse, the righteousness of the Law collapses. . . .  Only faith and the invoking of God’s completely pure mercy remain.’  This ran directly counter to Erasmus’s belief in human agency and the ability of men and women to use their reason and willpower to show modesty, forbearance, and other Christlike traits” (p. 346).  He believed the 10 Commandments applied to Christians, whereas Luther considered them part of the Law no longer required.  Erasmus would famously declare:  “Christ I recognize, Luther I know not.”  Though they never met and were never colleagues, Erasmus and Luther had for years supported each other’s endeavors, working to reform the Church.  But as Luther’s views turned more radical the two men parted ways.  At the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther laid down the gauntlet in his famous declaration:  “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason—for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves—I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.  I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me! Amen.”  Luther then severed ties with Rome, becoming the “pope of Wittenberg,” while Erasmus remained a loyal son of the Church.  

The two men most sharply disagreed about free will.  Luther believed that “never for a single moment” are things “under our control.”  Thus, it follows, “all things occur by absolute necessity.”  Erasmus, after extensive study in both Church Fathers and philosophy, published The Freedom of the Will: A Diatribe or Discourse, insisting on its reality, defending the traditional Catholic view.  The God whom Erasmus conjures up “is caring, wise, reasonable, and, above all, just” (p. 604).  The treatise elicited favorable reactions throughout Europe, but Luther would respond angrily.  He “felt that his entire gospel was at stake” and penned The Bondage of the Will, “one of his last important theological tracts.”  A “central tenet of Luther’s theology—that the sinner is justified by faith and grace alone, without the works of the law” was at stake.  He insisted “that humans are incapable of finding salvation through their own acts.  If an individual could choose to perform deeds that merited God’s favor, Luther’s whole system would collapse” (p. 671).  God alone does everything “‘by his immutable, eternal, and infallible will.  Here is a thunderbolt by which free will is completely prostrated and shattered’” (p. 672).   Ultimately, says Massing;  “The deities described in Erasmus’s and Luther’s dueling tracts could hardly be more dissimilar.  Erasmus’s God is an even-tempered rationalist who sagely judges men and women by how they behave in the world.  Luther’s God is an inscrutable being who acts according to his own unfathomable logic, apart from human understanding and expectation.  Erasmus’s God requires the existence of free will to ensure that his rule is just; Luther’s God has to reject free will to make sure his power is unbounded.  Whereas Erasmus wanted to protect the freedom of man to choose, Luther wanted to safeguard the freedom of God to act” (p. 675).

Thenceforth the Renaissance and Reformation took different trajectories.  Erasmus had stood for a moderate, reasonable religion, holding that:  “Believers are justified by faith, but works of charity are necessary as well.  Confession can be beneficial, as long as one does not dwell excessively on one’s sins and resolves to do better.  On fast days, those who eat should not insult those who abstain, and those who abstain should not condemn those who eat.  More generally, Erasmus urged Christians to ‘do nothing by violent or disorderly means, nor inflict on anyone anything for which, if done to us, we should call on heaven and earth and sea; nor force on anyone a new form of religion which he finds abhorrent’” (p. 753).  But his approach was rejected in northern Europe.  “As the great schism opened up in Christendom, a sort of religious lunacy had set in, with apostles and zealots of every stripe declaring theirs to be the only true creed and ready to slash and flay anybody who followed a different one” (p. 737).  Catholic and Protestant princes went to war.  The Christian world quickly fractured into increasing numbers of combative factions.  When Erasmus died, Luther said:  “‘He lived and died as Epicurus, without minister and consolation.”  In fact:  “He went to hell.”  In his declining days, before dying in 1546, Luther also lashed out at Zwinglians, Calvinists, and Jews.  It would lead to the “fatal discord” Erasmus feared.  

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G.K. Chesterton famously said:  “Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.”  Unlike other animals, there’s something deeply flawed in human beings.  We’re not quite what we’re designed to be.  That truth was evident to Edmund Burke two centuries ago.  Writing to Adam Smith, the noted ethicist/economist, he said:  “A theory like yours founded on the Nature of man, which is always the same, will last, when those that are founded upon his opinions, which are always changing, will and must be forgotten.”  But to recognize that there is something wrong with us is not, necessarily, to say everything about us is utterly awful.  That elementary fact generally eludes James Boyce, whose Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (Berkeley, CA:  Counterpart, c. 2015) endeavors to show original sin is a uniquely Western doctrine, crafted by St. Augustine in the fifth century A.D.  Boyce insists that neither Jews nor Eastern Orthodox Christians believed man is born bad, holding that he is basically good but makes poor choices considered sinful.  This position would be disputed by many Christian theologians and historians, but Boyce’s description of the doctrine’s development is generally accurate and certainly readable.   

The story begins with St Augustine (354-430 A.D.), the “father of original sin,” who in his Confessions said he found within himself  an “insurmountable depravity that must be accepted before grace, the unearned gift of God’s forgiveness, could be received.  Augustine’s point was that the desire to sin could not be banished by human effort” (p. 17).  He also found this truth confirmed by the story of Adam’s Fall as recorded in the book of Genesis.  (Whereas Augustine believed biblical account is fully historical, Boyce dismisses it as sheer myth.)  Most of Augustine’s pessimistic appraisal of man came as he struggled with the Donatists and Pelagians during last two decades of his life, when “he came to believe that human beings were so corrupted that they could not even choose to embrace the mercy of God: those who appeared to have chosen to be saved had, in reality, already been predestined by God for salvation” (p. 19).

In subsequent centuries Augustine’s position was never fully endorsed by Church scholars and councils, though belief in original sin remained firm.  Numerous dissidents,  such as Peter Abelard and Julian of Norwich, denied it, but the greatest Scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, was deeply Augustinian, though he defined original sin as a deprivation of goodness rather than an inherent depravity.  “The stain of sin does not impose a nature on the soul, but only the privation of grace,” he said.  We’re born with infirmities, much like blindness, and suffer a perpetual bent toward evil.  Then came Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers, who pushed the doctrine beyond Augustine.  In what he believed was “the unchangeable truth of God,” Luther denied the freedom of the will, insisting we continually sin in word, thought, and deed.  Soon thereafter John Calvin “presented himself as a modern-day” Augustine,  “seeking to defeat ‘the Pelagians of the present age’” (p. 75).  Along with Luther, he believed “that to lay claim to even a residual goodness within human beings proffered the false hope that people could do something to save themselves, and that this was the well-trodden road to hell” (p. 76).  Calvin’s stance informs the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith:   “Mankind is wholly defiled in all parts and faculties of soul and body … utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.”  Rejecting some of the Reformers’ dismal views regarding human nature, John Wesley, regarded by Boyce as the “founder” of Evangelicalism, “parted from Luther and Calvin in one highly significant respect:  he rejected the teaching that the impact of the Fall was so profound that human beings were incapable of making real choices—first to be saved, and second to be sanctified” (p. 116).  Sharing James Arminius’ critique of Calvinism, Wesley believed in a kind of synergism whereby God and man work together in the salvation process.  Centuries later, as evident in Billy Graham, this kind of Evangelicalism became dominant in America.  

In modern times, belief in original sin shifted.  But it didn’t disappear!  Boyce constructs a compelling case to show how it morphed into non-Christian views.  Though probably an atheist, Thomas Hobbes’ belief “in the innate evil of human beings rivaled that of Martin Luther” (p. 106).  Other eminent philosophers such as John Locke tended to blame the environment for man’s deviant decisions.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought we are born good but get corrupted by society.  Charles Darwin attributed evil to unavoidable evolutionary processes.  “Original sin had always seen human beings as innately self-centred creatures whose nature was to pursue their own interests at the expense of others’.   Charles Darwin provided a language in which this old religious idea could be renewed and given social scientific credence” (p. 151).  (A contemporary Darwinist, Richard Dawkins even claimed there ice a “selfish gene” imbedded in our biology!)  Sigmund Freud certainly found a depraved dimension to human nature!  Indeed, his “ideas in some ways resemble those of Thomas Hobbes, but Freud’s focus on the divided self—in which even the most worthy action or good deed is corrupted by innate drives which are beyond the power of the will to fully control— s closer in theory and sentiment to Augustine.  The fundamental similarity of the two men is accentuated by the importance each placed on sex” (p. 156).  

Born Bad provides us an informative journey of intellectual history documenting the persistence of the doctrine of original sin.  And though he would like to dismiss it as an erroneous view rooted in the “myth” of biblical teaching, he nevertheless demonstrate its enduring truth.  

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Nadya Williams earned a PhD from Princeton University and worked as a professor for 15 years, teaching history and classics before leaving academia to homeschool her kids.  To treasure marriage and children is, sad to say, countercultural in today’s America!  Yet:  “Compelling data exists, in fact, that it is married women with children who are the best off economically of all categories of women in modern American society.  Study after study shows that while single unwed mothers are not flourishing economically, people in happy marriages are financially better off, happier, and healthier” (p. 4).  More importantly, there is a deeply philosophical question we must ask:  “What is a human life worth?  Are some lives more economically beneficial to society than others?  And are there not ways of estimating the worth of a life that are not economically driven at all?  As a historian of the ancient world and the early church, I am reminded of the way the earliest Christians challenged the longstanding values of the pagan world around them to display a love of all humanity that was utterly radical—and costly.  The early Christians’ pro-life stance included, at the economic level, a radically different and selfless use of money for the benefit of others.  That we do not do so in our society today is a powerful reminder that the values of our society at large, including those of many confessing Christians within it, are values of the post-Christian culture all around rather than the church.  Without God and without the understanding of the imago Dei within each human being, what is a human life worth?  The pre-Christian Mediterranean world gives us a terrifying answer:  it depends. Those same values were also the values of the pre-Christian culture.  We are living in a crisis of devaluing all human life, and especially the lives of children” (p. 6).  

Williams has recently published Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic:  Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (Downers Grove IL:  IVP, c. 2024; Kindle Ed).  She seeks to address three questions.   “First, in what ways does this devaluing of motherhood and children in our own society manifest itself?  Just how deep does this problem go?  Second—and this is where my historical expertise will particularly come into play—how might the history of the extraordinary and unconditional valuing of human life in the early church help us to get back on track?” (p. 13).  Early Christians may very well give guidance to contemporary believers seeking to challenge the “culture of death” surrounding us.  We must learn to revere persons as persons, not as cogs in an economic machine.  “Third, where do we go from here?” (p. 14).  For guidance she explores the works of three thinkers (St Perpetua, St Augustine and Wendell Berry) who push “us to see the preciousness of all humanity in ways that acknowledge the challenges of this present life while insisting on the eternal truth about the priceless value of every human life” (p. 14).

Evidence for the devaluing of human beings is everywhere evident.  Consider the growing number of young folks who have no interest in having children, resulting in a growing “birth dearth” throughout the industrialized world.  The worldview of Margaret Sanger has become the norm—sexual pleasure, birth control, population control, eugenics.  The “difficult truth” we must address “is that contemporary US society utterly devalues children, motherhood, and the dignity of human life more generally.  This devaluing is an invisible cancer within our society that has pervaded every system of the body politic, including even the church” (p. 24).  But we find much the same in the ancient world.  Women and children, slaves and strangers, the sick and deformed were not necessarily valued.  Wars, such as Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, were often genocidal, killing the men and enslaving the women.   Indeed:  “we are looking at a world that saw no problem with the casually devastating cruelty of the strong toward the weak” (p. 89). 

Into this world came Christ and His Gospel!  Literally everyone—even “useless people”—had value.  Women and children, widows and orphans found comfort in the Church.  Jesus and the Church fathers promoted the physical and spiritual well-being of all peoples.  As Williams explores ancient texts, including the writings of one of the earliest Christian martyrs, St Perpetua, and the greatest ancient theologian, Augustine, she finds how Christians both challenged pagan thought and provided a better way for mankind.  She also finds in Wendell Berry (an “American Augustine”) a better way for our contemporaries,  many of whom are rootless, needing to discover a way to flourish as human beings.  Berry lived on a family farm in and defended deeply “traditional forms of flourishing, pushing back against the modern treadmill life as the only option, calling instead for ‘Nature as Measure,  . . .  Roots and rootedness, Berry’s writings repeatedly affirm, are key to human flourishing” (p. 197). 

Scholarly excellence, mixed with motherly empathy, make Williams’ treatise a fine conjunction of historical inquiry and contemporary wisdom.

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Rendering verdicts in good judicial systems requires evidence rightly presented and accepted by juries and judges.  So too historians ponder primary and secondary sources seeking to discern what actually happened long ago, looking for evidence enabling them to determine what’s true.  A similar thought process takes place when we think about the existence and nature of God, for there is, as Josh McDowell declared long ago, Evidence that Demands a Verdict.  Much such evidence is now available in God:  The Science, the Evidence (Palomar editions, c. 2025; Kindel; originally published in French as Dieu, La science, Les preuves, c. 2021) by Michel-Yves Bollore and Oliver Bonnassies.  That this 600 page non-fiction book has sold 400,000 copies in Europe is truly amazing!  It is, they say, “the culmination of nearly four years of research conducted in collaboration with a team of around twenty high-level international specialists and scientists.  Its objective is unique:  to shed light for you on the question of the existence or non-existence of a creator God, one of the most important questions of our lives which is being posed today in completely new terms” (p. 19).

For three centuries (1650-1950)—an era generally called modernity—scientific work gradually eclipsed theology as the highest and most certain form of knowledge.  Hand-in-hand with the scientific revolution came a revival of philosophical materialism, the dogma that matter-in-motion is all there is.  Claiming to be utterly scientific, materialistic ideologies such as Marxism, Freudianism, and Scientism enjoyed their day.  But then, a century ago, small cracks began to appear in the materialist edifice.  “During the first half of the twentieth century, belief in a simple, mechanical, and deterministic world was shattered by a more precise confirmation of the principles of quantum mechanics and its postulates of indeterminacy” (p. 28).  Drawing upon the best of current thought, the authors want “to gather into one volume the most up-to-date rational arguments for the possible existence of a creator God” (p. 31).

The authors begin by clarifying what they mean by scientific evidence, differentiating “absolute” from “relative” proofs.  Absolute truths exist in mathematics and logic, but only relative proofs can be discovered through scientific work, which must deal with “evidence of varying degrees of strength, the accumulation of which can nevertheless lead us to a conviction beyond all reasonable doubt” (p. 40).  As the history of science reveals, our understanding of the physical world continually expands and undergoes endless revisions.  What we find most persuasive generally “arises from the presence of multiple, independent, and converging pieces of evidence” (p. 49).  So when we look for scientific evidence demonstrating the reality of God we should acknowledge that we must rest content with relative or probable proofs.  

One of the most highly probable scientific maxims is the second law of thermodynamics.  Einstein declared it “the first law of all science.”  Notable 19th century thinkers demonstrated its importance, fleshing out the ramifications of its central tenet—entropy—detailing what Sir Arthur Eddington called the cosmological “arrow of time.”  Time is a linear, not a cyclical phenomenon, and ultimately the universe will collapse in a heat death.  “The Universe is like a fire crackling away in a fireplace.  Subject to the laws of thermodynamics, both are destined to burn themselves out over time.”  The logs gradually become embers, which die in due time.  Watching the fire we can rightly conclude that “since the fire is being consumed at a measurable rate, it cannot have been burning forever.  If it had always existed, then it would also have burned down and gone out an infinitely particular point in the past” (p. 64).  This fact gives substance to an ancient philosophical position, known as the Kalam cosmological argument, which holds:  1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause; 2) The Universe had a beginning; 3) Therefore the Universe has a cause.

Working out the implications of entropy (the central component of the second law of thermodynamics), physicists a century ago began to consider what came to be called the “big bang” origin of the universe.  As Einstein’s theories of relativity became accepted, the notion that the the material world was eternal and fixed began to dissolve.  In 1922 a young Russian, Alexander Friedmann, proposed the possibility of an expanding universe.  Five years later a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, pushed Einstein’s insights to their logical conclusions.  “Lemaitre summarized his conclusion thus:  ‘We can reason that space began with the primeval atom and that the beginning of space marked the beginning of time’” (p. 91).  His views were soon verified by Edwin Hubble, an astronomer looking into deepest space through his new telescope on Mount Wilson in California and observing an ever-expanding cosmos.   

Shocked at such findings, Fred Hoyle, an English astrophysicist, tried to dismiss the notion, coining the phrase “big bang” to ridicule it.  But in 1964, almost accidentally, two men detected Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), something that could only have resulted from an instantaneous beginning of the universe.  Ex nihilo—out of nothing!  Within 20 years confirmations of the “big bang” led to the development of what’s called the “Standard Model” embraced by most all physicists.  It is “supported by such a large number of probative observations that the vast majority of cosmologists now accept its central claims” (p. 107).  George Smoot, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize, said that what scientists now see is “‘like seeing God’” (p. 97).  And he was right, for the “big bang” makes it “clear that the Universe proceeds from a cause that is neither temporal, spatial, nor material.  In other words, it proceeds from a transcendent, non-natural cause at the origin of all that exists and, as we shall see, at the origin of the extreme fine-tuning of the Universe’s initial parameters and the laws of physics and biology, which are indispensable for the existence and evolution of atoms, stars, and complex life” (p. 100).  Indeed, Arno A. Penzias, 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, said the evidence shows “‘that not only is there a creation of matter but also the creation of space and time.’”  What we now know, he said,  is “‘exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole’” (p. 109).

The Standard Model gained currency despite several decades of furious opposition.  Indeed, some of its proponents were persecuted by the academic establishment!  Philosophical materialists realized it challenged their most important assumption, that there’s nothing but matter that has always existed.  “To save their ideology, they had to silence at all costs the scientists researching and publishing these theories.  Herein lies the great interest of the history of these persecutions.  The materialists would not have unleashed such extreme violence upon scientists who theorized the expansion of the Universe and the Big Bang had they not been convinced that these theories made a strong case for the existence of God” (p. 128).  In Russia, Alexander Friedmann declared:  “Gentlemen, we have demonstrated that the Universe has not existed forever.  It had a beginning, several billion years ago, in a far-off age when it was no bigger than a speck of dust!” (p. 137). Though his students applauded his work, the Bolsheviks did not!  They realized it refuted their doctrinaire materialism and tried to silence him.  Friedmann remained defiant though soon thereafter he died under suspicious conditions.  But during the 1930s Joseph Stalin sought to silence his disciples, calling them “Lemaître’s henchmen.”  The Secretary General of the Communist Party of Leningrad “summed up the Soviet stance toward the Big Bang in a few vitriolic words, calling Lemaître and his crew ‘imposter scientists who seek to bring back to life the fairy tale according to which the world came out from nothing!’  His objective was to savagely hunt down Lemaître’s ‘reactionary scientists.’  Anyone who spoke or wrote about expansion was systematically eliminated” (p. 240).  A number of other scientists suffered under Stalin’s great “purges” in the ‘30s and were imprisoned or executed.  Similarly, in Germany physicists believing in the expansion of the cosmos were persecuted, with many of them (especially if they were Jews) fleeing to the United States.  But even here they often suffered opposition—evident in subtle discrimination and forfeited career opportunities.  But ultimately the evidence proved overwhelming, and the Standard Model prevailed.  Even its most influential critic, Fred Hoyle, ultimately accepted it and ended his life espousing a kind of deism.

Having devoted many pages to the importance of the Big Bang, Bollore and Bonnassies focus on implications of our “finely tuned” cosmos that “will blow you away” (p. 182).  “The Universe now looks like a big ‘setup,’ an incredibly precise piece of machinery whose every part shows stunning fine-tunings of design—complex cogs that mesh together miraculously, creating the conditions necessary for the existence and functioning of the whole” (p. 182).  There are a dozen or so of these complex cogs, including:  the force of gravity; the electromagnetic force; the strong and weak atomic forces; the speed of light; the mass of protons and electrons.  These all involve extraordinary numbers which could only have come about by chance or “from the complex calculations of a highly intelligent creator God.”  Everything we know about the cosmos leads to the conclusion that these numbers inform everything that exists.  “For some of these numbers, a very slight variation by even a distant decimal point would have yielded an unrecognizable Universe, and we would not be here to talk about it.  This is the essence of the ‘fine tuning’ principle” (p. 185).  The possibility that all this “just happened” is simply beyond belief!  Indeed, one cosmologist says that this fine tuning can be compared to archer hitting a one “‘square centimetre target 15 billion light years away’ “ (p. 197).  In the face of all the evidence, materialists believing everything came to be through blind chance dramatically illustrate a blind faith.  Indeed, reasonable people should surely conclude there’s a God Who designed its all!  The Universe came to be in an instant, and its intricate laws shaped a world that sustains everything that is. 

Turning from physics to biology we encounter similar evidences for God.  “Modern biology has shed light on the incredible complexity of even the smallest living cell, which in fact bears a resemblance to an ultra-sophisticated factory.  We now know that the transition to life was an extremely unlikely and complex event that took place over a relatively short span of time.  Consequently, the thesis that life emerged by pure chance in a Universe that was not specifically designed to be hospitable to it is no longer tenable.  A biological fine-tuning is added to the cosmological” (p. 229).  The authors believe there is an “invisible hand” orchestrating the organic world.  There’s a great chasm separating the inorganic and organic worlds, and that chasm seems to be getting wider every day.  So far, “no definite intermediate steps have been identified between the most complex inert matter and the least complicated life forms currently known” (p. 239).  Tiny cells—and their even tinier components such as DNA—are incredibly complex entities made up of thousands of parts.  That a single cell could arise by chance is virtually impossible.  To Chandra Wickramasinghe, professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at University College Cardiff and former collaborator with Fred Hoyle:  “‘The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it …   It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.  There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence’” (p. 257).  

Having looked at evidence in physics and biology, the authors provide fascinating chapters dealing with significant scientists.  One chapter simply collects quotations from 100 eminent thinkers, many of them Nobel Prize winners.  For example, Alfred Kastler, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics and the inventor of the laser, said: “The idea that the world, the material universe, created itself, seems to me patently absurd.  I do not conceive of the world without a creator, which is to say without a god.  For a physicist, a single atom is so complicated, so pregnant with intelligence, that the materialist universe simply makes no sense.”  Again, said he: “There is no chance of explaining the emergence of life and its evolution by the interaction of chance forces. Other forces are at work” (p. 265).  

Another chapter cites studies indicating what today’s scientists believe.  A paper detailing a century of Nobel Prizes “showed that 90% of Nobel prize winners identified with some religion and that two-thirds of them have been Christians” (p. 297).  Only 10% identified themselves as atheists.   Additional chapters examine the religious views of two of the 20th century greatest thinkers—Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel.  To Einstein:  “‘everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve’” (p. 310).  Though everyone’s heard of Einstein, only a select few know anything about Godel.  But his mathematical “peers considered him a singular genius.  The ‘Gödelian revolution’ is considered one of the greatest transformations in the history of mathematics and logic” (p. 322).  He was deeply theistic, noting that his religion was rather “similar to church religion”—indeed the Christian faith.  Toward the end of his life he set forth an ontological argument designed to demonstrate the existence of God, reviving the insights of St Anselm and others.  

The strongest part of God, the Science, the Evidence, is the material devoted to contemporary science.  But Bollore and Bonnassies insist there are many significant kinds of inquiries, each needing an appropriate way of thinking.  So in the second half of the book they delve into realms of apologetics—evidences “outside the sciences.”  This includes a thoughtful appraisal of the Bible.  It is truly remarkable that a small nation in a semi-arid land, lacking great cities or universities, could incubate a book “which contained a goldmine of knowledge about humanity and the cosmos.”  It had little in common with the writings of their pagan neighbors.  It refused to deify nature and insisted on high moral standards.  Amazingly:  “Most of the Bible’s claims about the nature and origin of the cosmos would remain unverifiable and inaccessible to human reason throughout antiquity and for many centuries thereafter.  But over the last century or so, modern science has proved them true” (p. 339).  The Bible is so true about so many things that it’s clearly much more than a purely-human collection of writings.  The authors assess and repudiate several of the reputed “errors” of the Bible and show that “each one turns out to contain surprising cosmological and anthropological truths.”  Critics frequently fail to show any mastery of the material.  “It’s been said that to err is human.  If we can’t find a single error in the Bible’s thousands of pages, that may suggest that its inspiration lies elsewhere, beyond the human realm” (p. 380).

Turning to the central figure in the Christian tradition—Jesus—we find solid reasons to believe Him to be the Son of God.  Ancient historians, both Jewish (Josephus) and pagan (Tacitus), provide historical evidence concerning Him, and multiple, credible Christian writings force us to choose what to make of Him.  After evaluating various views—that He was simply wise teacher or Jewish prophet or charlatan or madman—the authors conclude He was what the Christian Church has always claimed:  God Incarnate.  Given that fact, Old Testament prophecies make sense.  The incredible claims He made for Himself (e.g. forgiving sins) make sense.  The behavior of his disciples following His resurrection make sense.  The evidence that demands a verdict leads to belief in Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.

There is also strong philosophical evidence demonstrating the existence of God.  As C.S. Lewis showed, in Mere Christianity, there is a universal moral sense pointing to the Author of an everlasting ethical code.  Following Lewis leads us to an “exciting  approach:  an exercise in listening to the interior voice of our conscience, whose echo also can be perceived, though in a manner totally different to the echo of the Big Bang. St. Augustine once gave this worthy piece of advice:  ‘Do not go outside yourself, but enter into yourself, for truth dwells in the interior self’” (p. 487).  Why is it that something inside us says “no” or “don’t” when we envision doing some kinds of things?  If there’s nothing wrong with stealing an unattended car why do we feel guilty when doing it?  Yet many moderns say you’re free to do whatever you please.  Thus Jean-Paul Sartre pondered a passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that said:  “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.”  To Sartre, that meant:  “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.”  He stands alone, radically free to forge his own morality, for if there’s no God we find no “values or commands” to guide us apart from our personal inclinations.  Sartre’s purely subjective morality was endorsed by an eminent materialist philosopher, Richard Taylor:  “‘In a world without God, no purpose can be right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgment.  This means that it is impossible to condemn war, persecution or crime as evil.  Nor can anyone admire brotherhood, equality and love.  Because in the universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong’” (p. 490).  Anyone upset by the genocidal regimes in Germany, Russia, China, and Cambodia understand their actions by understanding their godless philosophies.  

Countering the philosophies of men such as Sartre and Taylor, Bollore and Bonnassies urge us to mine the riches of the Western philosophical tradition, beginning with Plato, “the first philosopher” to sense that there is a non-material world pointing to a “world soul” responsible for all that is.  Plato thought logic and mathematics enable us to discern that there is a “great organizer” who shaped the universe.  His student, Aristotle, “constructed a much more complex argument, arriving at God through the idea of motion.”  To him:  “Everything moving is moved by something else, which is moved by something else.”  There “cannot be an infinite series of movers.  The series must stop somewhere.  Otherwise, there would be no movement at all” (p. 496).  In fine:  There must be a Prime Mover.  Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas incorporated Greek philosophy into a comprehensive worldview that still proves persuasive for serious thinkers, as was evident in the resurgence of theistic philosophy following WWII.  

Highly accomplished philosophers have showed the shallowness of much that had transpired in modern times.  A variety of modern “objections to the existence of God had been carefully sifted, weighed, and ultimately found unconvincing.” Metaphysics once again began a serious discipline.  “Never before have so many and such good books been written about proofs for God’s existence than in our time” (p. 502).  An impressive of brilliant thinkers—including Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, William Craig, Robert Koons, and Edward Feser—demonstrate how effectively philosophers can argue for God’s existence.  Many of them show that “the correspondence between the free speculation of mathematicians and the physical reality of the world remains inexplicable apart from a coincidence bordering on the miraculous.  This seeming impasse actually points toward its solution:  mathematical formulae preceded the formation of the world; or, in other words, the world was conceived by an intelligent being” (p. 505).  

A French mathematician, René Thom, noted that these abstract formulae should persuade us that “‘Plato’s theory—that the universe is being informed by eternal static ideas—is a very natural and philosophically simple explanation’” (p. 505).  

The remarkable book concludes that:  “Materialism has always been just a belief, but today it increasingly appears as an irrational belief” (p. 535).  Evidence disproving it has been accumulating, and the authors believe:   “Our book is unique in offering a comprehensive panorama—including cosmology, philosophy, ethics, and historical enigmas. This richness of perspectives is possible only because evidence for God’s existence appears in every field of human study” (p. 536).  “As Paul of Tarsus writes in Acts 17:26-27, ‘God made them [men], so that they would search for Him, and if possible, grope for Him and find Him, who in fact is not far from each one of us.’  These words encourage us to persevere in our search. We hope this book will help in that endeavour” (p. 538).  And, indeed, it does!

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Following the Islamic terrorists’ attacks on 9/11/2001, President George W. Bush naively referred to Islam as “the religion of peace.”  Nonsense!  As the great Harvard historian Samuel Huntington said many years ago, Islam has always had “bloody borders.”  The great French philosopher Jacques Ellul also rejected  the “current of favorable predispositions to Islam” notably evident in the many euphemistic discussions of jihad,” saying Jihad is basic to Islam— a sacred duty for the faithful, the “normal path to expansion” via wars of conquest.  Devout Muslims are determined to conquer and control as much of the globe as possible.  Writing presciently, in 1991, Ellul declared:  “Hostage-taking, terrorism, the destruction of Lebanese Christianity, the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy Israel) . . . all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the traditional policy of Islam.”  History records this, for immediately following the prophet Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D. Muslim warriors launched a century of world-wide conquests remarkable both for their rapidity and brutality.  Though Spanish Christians notched a memorable victory at Covadonga in 722, their nation would be controlled for centuries by Muslims.  Only in France, in 732 (at the Battle of Tours), did Charles Martel’s Christian soldiers successfully defeat the Arabs and save most of Europe from Islam.  But in 1453 Muslims finally conquered Constantinople, burying the last remnants of the once powerful Byzantine Empire and adding the Balkans to their hegemony.  Less than a century later, in 1529 (as Luther was orchestrating his Reformation in Wittenberg), Muslim armies threatened Vienna, only to be repelled by Emperor Charles V.  In short:  for 1400 years Islam has waged Jihad and taken control of great regions once controlled by Christians.

The recent Hamas slaughter of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, is yet another instance in this centuries-long Jihad.  On that day some 6,000 Muslims charged out of Gaza and killed 1200 Jews.  Equally appalling, almost immediately there were mass  demonstrations in the West supporting not the Israelis but Hamas!  Protestors carried signs that read “From the River to the Sea,” “Resistance Is Justified,” “Resistance Is Not Terrorism,” “Fight White Supremacy,” “Long Live the Intifada,” and “By Any Means Necessary.”  They celebrated the terrorists and chanted their victory cry:  “Allahu Akbar!”  Jewish synagogues and schools were firebombed and shot at.  Still more:  “Throughout this period, from the moment news of the massacre in Israel emerged, one thing in particular is worth noticing:  there was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city.  Not one.  The people who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the object of criticism on the streets of one Western city” (p. xi).  

To understand what happened (and why it matters), reading Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2025; Kindle Edition) proves enlightening.  Murray is an English journalist living in America, the author of some fine works, including The War on the West.  As soon as he heard about the Hamas invasion he flew to Israel to investigate.  Having  covered wars on three continents, he’d “seen my share of horrors.  But there was something unusual about this atrocity.”  What appalled him “was that the terrorists of October 7 did what they did with such relish.  Not just the endless shouting of their war cries.  Or the visible glee you could see in their faces and hear in their voices.  It was the fact that all of this gave them such intense joy.  And that they were proud of their actions” (p. xiii).  Murray provides historical details as well as eye-witness accounts to explain the significance of 10/7/23.  The role of Ayatollah Khomeini, who established the radical Islamist regime in Iran in 1979, must be understood, for Hamas today is largely funded and supplied by the Iranians who, at Friday prayers, cry out “Death to America,” calling America “the Great Satan” and Israel “the Little Satan” who need to be destroyed.  But Hamas has also received generous subsidies from the United States!  “Since 2009 alone, two years after Hamas took full control of Gaza, the US government sent over $400 million there, mainly through the United States Agency for International Development” (p. 123).  Much of this money ended up in the pockets of Hamas’s leaders, making several of them billionaires!  “While claiming that their people were living in a poverty-stricken concentration camp, these leaders lived in luxury hotels and penthouses in Qatar” (p. 124).  

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it became a totally Muslim region.  Shortly thereafter Hamas won an election and took control and ramped up rocket attacks on Israel.  Jewish settlers near Gaza, generally living in kibbutzim, built bomb shelters for safety but tried to live peacefully with Palestinians in Gaza.  But on October 7 everything changed.  Hoards of armed Hamas terrorists swarmed through the region, killing and raping, stealing and destroying everything in sight.  “Most terrorist groups do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.  Or they regard all the citizens of a country they oppose to be one and the same.  The professed logic of Hamas is that since Israel has military conscription for most young Israelis—both men and women—any military-aged Israeli is a legitimate target, whether they are in uniform or not, that the elderly could have served in the army, and that any young Israeli—even a baby—could grow up to be in the military.  By this logic absolutely every Israeli is a legitimate target and there is no such thing as innocent and guilty, combatant and noncombatant” (p. 73).

Though Murray is personally quite secular, while writing this book he “kept finding the same lines coming back to me.  First was the line from Deuteronomy when God says:  ‘I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.’  I thought also of the Psalmist who says, ‘I shall not die, but live.’  I thought of these lines continuously, even in the moments when things could not have been darker” (p. 157).

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In 2020 Douglas Murray republished an e-book, Islamaphilia:  A Very Metropolitan Malady (Kindle Edition).  Islamaphilia can “be defined as the expression of disproportionate adoration of Islam.”  He thinks it  strange that many people can be quite critical—even insulting—of other religions but give a “pass” to Islam.  So he wrote this short book to illustrate the phenomenon by citing prominent persons mouthing it.  Turning first to politicians, Murray cites a prominent French politician, Jacques Chirac, who deftly re-wrote history by celebrating a “Europe whose roots are as much Muslim as Christian.”  Then there was President Barack Obama addressing the United Nations, praising Islam and warning:  “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” (p. 14).  John Brennon, Obama’s head of the CIA, said he “came to see Islam not how it is often misrepresented, but for what it is—how it is practiced every day, by well over a billion Muslims worldwide, a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity” (p. 15).  Entertainers also endeavor to speak favorably of Islam.  It’s difficult to find “one mainstream film, movie, TV series or documentary that has run anything at all that is critical of Islam” (p. 28).  Cartoons are tightly censored.  Comics muzzle themselves.  “There is never an opportunity missed to portray the Crusaders as dirty, dark ages villains, and no opportunity avoided to show the Muslims as golden age golden boys” (p. 31).  Academics and journalists rarely write anything negative about Islam.  Fearless atheists such as Richard Dawkins become silent when asked to assess it.  One might expect the Christian churches to defend their faith, but they “long ago made their peace with Islam. Today many appear to have fallen in love with it” (p. 55).  The one prominent Christian leader who mildly criticized Islam was Pope Benedict XVI.  In a lecture in Regensberg, Germany, he cited a Byzantine Emperor who said something negative about Mohammed.  Though he differed with the emperor and tried to engage Muslims in dialogue, Benedict was subjected to torrents of rage throughout the Islamic world.  They rioted, attacked and killed Christians in Africa and the Middle East.  But not to worry, the future Pope Francis I (then the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires) criticised Benedict and urged other Catholics to join him in defying the head of the Church.

Summing up his presentation, Murray thinks Islamopiles refuse to criticize Islam because they have a “desire to be nice” while “knowing of very little” about it.  They also live in fear of terrorists’ attacks.  Summing up:  “Islam is quite new to the West in such large numbers.  In the last fifty years, millions of Muslims have come here.  Most of them add a lot and want to give a lot.  Some have views which are hard or impossible to compromise with and bring utterly unacceptable baggage.  For all their talk, most people with any influence or position look at these people with terror.  The politicians have no idea what they’re going to think of them.  Artists and writers have been caught off-guard.  Having poked at empty hornets’ nests for so many years they have forgotten the courage required to do the necessary poking at full ones. And then in general—in wider society as well—you have the terrible problem that as each year goes by more and more people appear to know less and less. Such people are easy prey to people who tell them lies about history, lies about the present and lies that simply sound nice” (p. 58).  It’s time to learn some hard truths about Islam and deal with it both wisely and firmly.  

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Melanie Phillips is an English journalist who moved from the radical left to the traditional right in the culture wars dividing her nation.  More than a decade ago she wrote The World Turned Upside Down, warning of immanent threats to our civilization.  As a journalist she strives to be tell truth to power, to follow the evidence and think logically.  She came to believe “that power has now hijacked truth and made it subservient to its own ends.  The result is a world turned upside down.”  This results from two centuries of intellectual developments which can “be summed up as man first dethroning God in favor of reason, then dethroning reason in favor of man, and finally dethroning man himself.  This was done by replacing objective knowledge with ideology, which grew out of the belief that man was all-powerful and could reshape the world in whatever image he chose.” 

Prodded by the “Hamas-led program” on 10/7/23, Phillips sought to understand it in the broadest possible context.  So she wrote The Builder’s Stone:  How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It (New York:  Post Hill Press, c. 2025; Kindle Edition).  Phillips warns:  “The West is poised at a momentous and fateful juncture.  I have written for many years about the onslaught being mounted against Western society by its enemies, both within and without.  I have never felt such a strong sense of living at a key turning point in the history of civilisation itself—until now.  In part, this is personal.  I am a British Jew and I live for most of the time in Israel. I was there on October 7, 2023, that terrible day when Israelis endured the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust.  I was there during the war that followed.  It’s been impossible not to feel that we are living through a seismic episode in Jewish history” (p. 6).   

Beyond describing what happened, Phillips wants to explain it, to unveil “the forces that have driven the supposed apex of reason, conscience and progress that is Western society off the intellectual, moral and cultural rails into unreason, demoralisation and a pre-modern atavism.  This is at root a spiritual problem, a crisis over meaning and purpose.  That takes us headfirst into the issue of religious belief” (p. 8).  Religion is, indeed, the “key issue behind the West’s civilizational travails.  A spiritual vacuum underpins the denigration of the nation, the abandonment of the family, the destruction of education; it has shaped contempt for the past and despair about the future; it has replaced emotional health by a profound loneliness.  All these things are connected” (p. 9).  The Hamas terrorists were not simply killing innocent Jews—they were trying to dismantle the civilization shaped by Jewish and Christian theology.  The throngs of people in London and America supporting Hamas were in fact in fact turbo-charging “the West’s decades-long process of cultural suicide” (p. 12).  

During the past century many Westerners have abandoned their civilization’s sinews, creating “a vacuum into which the Islamists have marched” (p. 26).  Islam is now the fastest-growing religion in Europe, and some areas in France are completely controlled by Muslim immigrants.  Islamists have successfully forged a “red-green alliance” with left-wingers so as to subvert and destroy Western Christian Culture.  Thus:  “White liberals are Islamic supremacists’ useful idiots” (p. 32).  They portray Palestinians as victims and Israelis as oppressors.  “The terrible truth is that the West no longer understands what civilization actually is.  Specifically, it no longer understands that civilization is Western, that the West gave birth to it.  Instead, our best and brightest have told us for decades that the West was born in the original sins of imperialism and colonialism, racism and white privilege.  It’s not worth fighting or dying for.  Indeed, John Lennon’s “‘nothing to fight or die for’  is the mantra of the modern deracinated liberal” (p. 35).

Western civilization has, unfortunately, been unravelling for some time.  It seems incapable of defending itself or recovering its vitality.  This is most manifest in the decline of patriotism, the collapse of the family and the decline of religious observance.  Ours is the world proposed in John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” celebrating the “brotherhood of man” with “no countries…and no religion too.”   The dedication to “human rights,” Phillips says, “is nothing less than a secular, quasi-religious movement.  It provides what purports to be the defining creed of the modern world in a promise to perfect humanity” (p. 151).  But Western Civilization was built in accord with the Jewish and Christian commitment to duties, not rights!  The elevation of rights over duties is quite apparent in Britain and America, most especially in their churches.  Wherever liberalism (or progressivism) prevails religious life atrophies.  “The liberal churches, Phillips says,  “seem to believe that moral laws militate against compassion, driving away people who want the freedom to live and love as they want.  But a lax approach that goes with the flow and eventually changes the church out of all recognition undermines the point of having a church at all” (p. 331).

After exploring the myriad problems besetting us Phillips suggests some ways to revive Western Civilization and build a better world.  Just as the medieval Spaniards launched a reconquista to take back their homeland from the Muslims we need to take up arms and recover our culture.  What we need is a fresh corps of leaders, for those now in power “have trampled over the concerns of ordinary people, denouncing them as ‘deplorables,’ ‘racists,”’and transmitters of ‘phobic’ forms of mental disorder—otherwise known as dissenting opinions” (p. 308).  But all this can change!  “It is possible to insist upon educators actually educating rather than indulging in social engineering or propaganda.  It is possible to empower parents, to incentivize marriage and having children.  It is possible to junk the destructive attachment to universalist institutions such as ‘human rights’ law and revive instead the primacy of the common law in Britain and the primacy of legislation passed by national parliaments.  It is possible to restore the value of the nation by policing its borders and safeguarding its historic identity.  It is possible to choose cultural survival rather than to slide off the edge of the cliff” (p. 309).

All this is only possible, however, if the Judeo-Christian moral code can be reestablished.  Young crusaders like Charlie Kirk could, in fact, lead us back to the eternal truths of Scripture.  “People are palpably crying out for meaning in their lives.  The apparently inexorable march of destructive cultural forces isn’t inexorable at all.  The problem is that they have never been properly understood and properly opposed.  The time has come for a counterrevolution on all fronts to save civilization.  There needs to be a rescue program of action:  civilization’s resistance movement,” a reconquesta akin to that undertaken by the Spaniards century ago.  We need intellectual crusaders like Thomas Aquinas, who wrote Summa Contra Gentiles to counter Islam.   And the Jewish people must play an essential role in that counterrevolutionary resistance” (p. 311).  That they may do so leads Phillips to conclude:  “For up against the unconscionable evil that was unleashed upon them on that terrible October day, the Jews are teaching their most important lesson of all, the one upon which all their other lessons depend, the one that lies at the very core of their astonishing resilience and survival in the face of overwhelming odds.  It couldn’t be more simple, more obvious, and more ignored.  It’s the most fundamental requirement for the West, and yet it’s the one that the West has yet fully to understand.  It consists of just two words.  Choose life” (p. 338).  

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In 2006, following a terrorist attack in London’s underground railway (the Tube), Melanie Phillips published Londonistan: Britain’s Terror State from Within (London:  Gibson Square; Kindle Edition).   Recently writing a forward to the reissuing of that treatise, she notes “it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation.”  The two-edged sword of Islam and cultural chaos is destroying her nation.  “The London bombings revealed a terrible truth about Britain, something even more alarming and dangerous to long-term stability than the fact that foreign terrorists had been able to carry out the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001.  They finally lifted the veil on Britain’s dirty secret in the war on terrorism—that for more than a decade, London had been the epicentre of Islamic militancy in Europe.  Under the noses of successive British governments, Britain’s capital had turned into ‘Londonistan’—a mocking play on the names of such state sponsors of terrorism as Afghanistan—and become the major European centre for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism.”  

This has come to pass because:  “Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an ‘anything goes’ culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behaviour have become unchallengeable rights.  With everyone’s lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of moral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice.  Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilisation, have been pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults.  . . . . The outcome has been the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets.” 

At the heart of all this is an ideology of autonomous individualism, a feminism that despises men and marriage, schools celebrating “child-centered” pedagogy, and an anti-racism that is actually racist.  Whereas in America some of the churches have held fast to the Western Christian tradition, “the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from the Judeo-Christian heritage.  At every stage it has sought to appease the forces of secularism, accommodating itself to family breakdown, seeking to be nonjudgmental and embracing multiculturalism.  The result has been a shift in Britain’s centre of moral and political gravity as the Judeo-Christian foundations of British society have come under sustained assault.”  Consequently:  Britain “has effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or ‘antiracists’ who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands.” 

Following WWII and the collapse of the British Empire several million Muslims entered England, many of them enjoying the generous welfare system of their host nation—free education, medical care, unemployment benefits.  They enjoyed the status of “victims” and manipulated the notion of “human rights” to magnify their political power.  They now control significant sections of London.  Linking hands with English socialists they are committed to destroying what’s made Britain British, making multiculturalism “the orthodoxy of the day, along with nonjudgmentalism and lifestyle choice.  The only taboo now was the expression of normative majority values such as monogamy, heterosexuality, Christianity or Britishness.”  Unless this process is reversed, Phillips warns, Britain will soon no longer be British.  

As an atheistic medical doctor Michael Egnor believed the material world was all there is.  He basically agreed with William Provine, a Cornell University biologist, a Distinguished University Professor, who said, in 1994:   “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear—and these are basically Darwin’s views.  There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind.  There is no life after death.  When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am 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.”  Such was the godless world Egnor embraced.

He became a neurosurgeon wanting “to solve the mysteries of the brain and the mind—where our perceptions and thoughts come from, how consciousness comes from this landscape of gyri and sulci, how the mind emerges from this elegant three-pound organ” (p. 3).  But as he aged there were occasional “eerie feelings” or “hauntings” that troubled him, most often when he was alone and contemplative, perhaps lying awake in the night or seeing a sunset.  “They were disturbing and enticing at the same time.”  In those moments he wondered:  “Why was I here?  Why does anything exist?  What is life all about?” (p. 5).  Such questions became more intense when his second son was born and showed troubling signs of autism.  “One night, it all came to a head.  I was called to see a patient at a Catholic hospital in another town.  As I was leaving the hospital, I passed the chapel.  I thought, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I’ll do anything now.  I just want my son to know me.’  I went into the chapel and knelt before the altar. ‘God,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if you exist, but I need help.  I am terrified that my son is autistic.  It’s agony to have a child who will never know or love me.’  Then I heard a voice—it was the only time in my life I’d ever heard a voice in my head that was not mine—and the voice said,  But that’s what you’re doing to Me’” (p. 5).

He left “the chapel a shaken man, and a different man.”   The next day he contacted a priest and asked to be baptized.  He realized that what had haunted him “all my life was the quest for truth.  And when I found that Truth, it changed me” (p. 8).  Soon thereafter he found his son acting quite normally, showing none of the worrisome autistic signs that had so distressed him.  “I knew I had experienced a miracle.  It seemed as if, just as I had stopped ignoring the Lord, He had also allowed my son to see me” (p. 8).  He realized that there are “thin places” that allow us to discern God if only we learn to look through them.  He shares the results of his spiritual journey in The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York:  Worthy Publishing, c. 2025; Kindle Edition), co-written with Denyse O’Leary.  Unfortunately, as a scientist he “had been trained to believe that the soul is a myth and the mind is nothing more than the brain—that is, a physical machine.”  But as he pursued the truth he “discovered that these supposed findings of science were myths.  The real findings point in another direction.”  Having done 7,000 brain surgeries and taught in medical school, he has seriously weighed the evidence and “come to see that the human soul is real and that human beings are not mere machines made of meat.”  He now knows, through personal experience and careful study of philosophical materials, “that we human beings are spiritual, and not merely physical, creatures, created by God and destined for eternal life” (pp. 10-11). 

Egnor begins his book by showing that surgeons seeking to stop epileptic siezures can split the brain into two hemispheres while the mind remains unified.  A century ago a famous neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, discarded his philosophical materialism after dealing with the reality of human consciousness revealed in his epileptic patients undergoing surgery that split their brains in half.  He found that “the brain was merely transmitting the instructions provided by the mind, which was a separate entity from the brain” (p. 28).  Thus the mind is something other than the brain and deftly uses it.  Penfield was especially struck by man’s ability to reason, to think abstractly.  His conclusions were reinforced by Roger Sperry’s experiments in the 1960s, showing that:  “A person with a split brain was still—in every way that mattered—one person with one mind.” (p. 21).  As the decades have passed, the conclusions of Penfield and Sperry have been confirmed:  “Split-brain patients have split perception but unified consciousness” (p. 23).  

Neurosurgeons such as Egnor must often remove parts of the brain to save a person’s life.  Treating strokes and tumors they cut out sizable sections of the cerebellum or other parts of the brain.  If the mind is nothing more than the brain it would seem to follow that the one’s mental faculties would be seriously impaired in such operations.  But they’re not.  Nor do they necessarily end when a person slips into a coma.  In fact, Egnor routinely tells “families of comatose patients to assume that their loved ones can hear everything said around them, and to keep the conversation upbeat and hopeful.  It really makes a difference” (p. 58).  So too, many persons suffering dementia (leading materialists to assume parts of the brain are diseased or dead) dramatically become quite lucid, often just before death.  “Terminal/paradoxical lucidity is a direct challenge to materialist theory” (p. 74).  

Equally challenging to materialists are credible Near Death Experiences such as the one recounted by Pam Reynolds.  To treat a life-threatening brain condition she sought out the world’s leading aneurysm neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, whose “strategy was literally to create brain death due to a low body temperature and no blood circulation.  That would give him a thirty-minute window to get rid of the aneurysm while her brain was like an object, unable to react” (p. 85).  “Her  EEG was silent, her brain stem responses were absent, and no blood flowed through her brain—in fact, all the blood was drained out of her brain.  Yet her NDE entailed detailed knowledge of events in the operating room during clinical brain death, details that were confirmed afterward” (p. 91).   Though she was, clinically speaking, brain dead, she felt herself leaving her body, watching the doctor as he worked, and she “was the most aware that I think that I have ever been in my entire life.”  Then she slipped into another realm of reality, seeing people who “fit perfectly into my understanding of what that person looked like at their best during their lives”  (p. 88).  

Thus, to Egnor, the “immortality of the soul is a reasonable belief.”  As is belief in the reality of God, who has given us our soul!  He thinks “the mind can function independently of the brain forever because it belongs to a class of entities that are immortal by their very nature” (p. 124).  Indeed, he says:  “This is at the heart of the mystery I discovered in surgery and in learning and contemplation about the mind and brain—we are hybrids, composites of spirit and matter, with souls that bridge the spiritual world and the material world.  We are mineral (in our bones), vegetable (in our growth and nourishment), animal (in our movement and sensations), and spiritual (in our reason and free will).  We humans embody all elements of creation” (p. 190).   But ultimately:  “The fact that we have souls, that our souls are spiritual and made in God’s image and are destined for immortal life, is the most important thing about us.  Nothing matters more” (p. 219).   

The Immortal Mind is an engaging, readable, persuasive treatise, worth pondering and recommending.

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In 2004 Richard Sternberg was the managing editor of a journal published by the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History.   He approved and published an article by Stephen Meyer that dealt with the Cambrian explosion and mentioned (in one sentence) the possibility of intelligent design—“the first peer-reviewed article in a technical biology journal to do so.”  Soon thereafter the defenders of Darwinian dogma (including the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins) attacked Sternberg for allowing Meyer’s article to appear.  He ultimately lost his position at the Smithsonian and forfeited significant research opportunities.  But David Klinghoffer, a writer for The National Review, began following the controversy and has recently published Plato’s Revenge:  The New Science of the Immaterial Genome (Seattle. Discovery Institute Press, 2025; Kindle Edition).  

The book’s title is important, for in The Last Battle (the final volume of The Chronicles of Narnia) C.S. Lewis declared:   “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”  And what Plato said, in his Timeaus, was that there is a god who orders the cosmos in accord with mathematics and works demonstrating “intelligent choice and design.”  There is an eternal realm providing the “forms” that shape all of creation.  Though Aristotle disagreed with his teacher in many ways he remained, Sternberg believes, a Platonist inasmuch as he “rejected any role for chance in shaping life,” for to him “‘chance acting over extended periods of time could never do anything creative.  It will primarily corrupt artifacts and break them apart’” (p. 110).  Consequently, he identifies himself, philosophically, as a “Platonic-Aristotelian.” 

Though a biologist by training, Sternberg seriously studied philosophy and contributed an essay, “Logos and Materialism: Why Aristotle Favors Intelligent Design and not Physicalist Thomism,” to Ann Gauger’s  God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design,   He began by citing Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics noted that the pre-Socratics were generally monistic materialists who tried to understand the physical world on a purely physical basis but found themselves needing to anchor their beliefs in “principles” transcending it.  Aristotle thought it “was not likely” that these principles could be found in a purely physical realm.  “So when someone said there is intelligence in nature just as in animals and that this is the thing responsible for the order and arrangement of everything, he seemed like a sane man in contrast to the random statements of his predecessors.” 

Though Aristotle is often portrayed as a materialist, Sternberg thinks he “condones and indeed makes inferences to agency and design” that are “incompatible with a mechanistic naturalism and all that it entails.  For as he puts it in his case against Democritus, Empedocles, and others, it is ‘[not] right to entrust the fact that things are in a beautiful state to spontaneity and chance’” (p. 325).   Though he certainly departed from Plato in some ways, Aristotle maintained many Platonic views—especially inasmuch as he took an anti-materialistic position.  This was affirmed in Simplicius of Cilicia’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics:  “Thus the truly marvelous Aristotle brought his teaching about physical principles to the point of the theology of the supernatural and showed that the entire physical or bodily order was dependent on the nonbodily and boundless intellectual goodness above nature, in this also following Plato.”  To Sternberg:  “Aristotle clearly believed that the form of an animal was immaterial and transcended the animal’s physical substance.  In addition, forms are the products of a supreme mind and not the result of matter’s self-organizing capacities.”  

Though he went through the conventional scientific training and was an atheist in his early years, Sternberg is a curious person who read widely, had serious conversations with philosophers, and became aware of enlarging loopholes in conventional Neo-Darwinian biology.  So he’s not a conventional thinker and questions established dogmas, taking seriously new hypotheses that may better explain the data.  Thus he often doubts that purely physical genomes shape and fully explain cells.  He wonders, for example, how a one-celled human conceptus, considered only as a material entity, could possibly contain all the information necessary to build an extraordinarily complex human being.  In fact he has concluded “that the genome is immaterial in nature” (p. 45).  And he’s not alone in taking this position, for “biologist Michael Levin, with dual appointments at Tufts and Harvard and not an ID advocate, published a paper arguing, in his own words, ‘for a Pythagorean or radical Platonist view in which some of the causal input into mind and life originates outside the physical world’” (p. 45).  

Sternberg openly acknowledges ancient thinkers such as Plotinus as philosophical guides for his position.  He also thinks Aristotle rightly understood important aspects of embryology, opposing “the idea of pangenesis, of inheritance by particles.”  There are certainly tiny bits of matter involved, but:  “‘What takes those particles and builds them up into an embryo?  The analogy is to letters, composing syllables, composing words and phrases and sentences.  What’s generating that language?  Is ink composing it?  No, there has to be a source of agency.’  There is an end goal, a disembodied telos, that Sternberg says ‘attracts’ the embryo’s development.  ‘It’s almost the inverse of the modern conception” and yet one that he thinks is correct.” (p. 51).  He has aligned himself with “a tradition has persisted from ancient to modern times which, while using different terms, has seen in the genome not a material entity alone but an immaterial one as well:  abstract, mathematical, not restricted to space-time” (p. 70).

Still more:  as we study genomes we find “computational issues” that challenge mechanistic explanations of it.  There’s a “surreal reality” to the cell that seems more like dancers than machines.  This dance needs a choreographer who  “not only selects which of 21 million proteins to make but also directs the process by which they are made and employed?” (p. 92).  The mathematical aspects of this are “hyper-astronomical” and “pose an overwhelming challenge to any strictly materialist account of the genome’s operation” (p. 93).  There’s no possibility that something as complex as the single-celled embryo (much less the universe) could result from “chance and necessity.”  More than “matter in motion” is involved. 

Plato’s Revenge is worthwhile both for its explication of Sternberg’s thought and exposing the ostracism he’s endured for challenging the evolutionary establishment.  Klinghoffer writes clearly and enables those of us with limited scientific expertise to grasp a bit of what’s going on in the highest realms of biological research.  As Jay Richards says:  “Darwinian materialism fails to explain the biological information in DNA sequences. But that truth merely scratches the surface when it comes to explaining biological form. To understand organisms in all their complexity, argues Richard Sternberg, we must break completely with nineteenth-century materialism and reconsider the thought of ancient greats such as Plato and Aristotle. Sternberg’s argument might seem daunting to the non-specialist, but David Klinghoffer does a masterful job of explaining Sternberg’s revolutionary thought in a delightfully accessible way.” 

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David Bentley Hart is a prolific (24 books, 1,000+ articles), often controversial philosopher/theologian espousing an Eastern Orthodox perspective.  He generally writes for a scholarly audience, and I don’t commend his latest treatise to general readers since his language is often rather dense and difficult to fathom unless one is familiar with professorial lingo.  Nevertheless his All Things Are Full of Gods:  The Mysteries of Mind and Life (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 2024; Kindle Edition) provides a tantalizing discussion of current theories dealing with the philosophy of mind.  He does this in imaginary dialogues—colloquys—between ancient Greco-Roman gods (Psyche; Eros; Hermes; and Hephaestus) wherein   they discuss and debate the origin and nature of human consciousness—the mind, one of the most important philosophical questions.  This is a vital issue, for “the advent and eventual triumph” of mechanistic materialism” or “methodological naturalism” during the Enlightenment has deeply shaped modernity.  Hart sees “the modern mechanistic view of things as a kind of psychological disorder—a psychosis perhaps, or a neurosis at the very least” (p. 110). 

Before the Enlightenment, influential thinkers such as Plato thought there was a mental aspect to Reality, something “transcendent or immanent or both” sustaining the world.  Hart wants to revive that ancient view, validating it in the face of myriad materialistic assumptions and declarations.  “Mind in itself must be that simpler, more basic, unifying ground, and matter must be an expression of mind—infinite mind, in fact” (p. 65).  “My position,” he says “is definitely a kind of ‘idealism,’ but of a far more ancient and classical sort than” set forth by George Berkeley.  Hart’s views seem compatible with some kinds of “panpsychism’ and “vitalism,” for he thinks that “mind and life are both irreducible” and are in fact manifestations of the same underlying reality.  Furthermore:  he would include language “as yet another aspect of one and the same irreducible phenomenon, ultimately inexplicable in mechanistic terms.  It is also my conviction that a truly scrupulous phenomenology of mental agency discloses an absolute engagement of the mind in an infinite act of knowing that is nothing less than the source and end of all three of these realities, and indeed of all things; or, to say this more simply, all acts of the mind are participations in the mind of God” (pp. 17-18).  “Or, then again, I might also say that what I hope to demonstrate is that ‘in the beginning was the Logos’” (p. 18).  

The first dialogue shows Psyche musing about the existence and essence of a rose.  This “admittedly humble episode” enables her to declare “that mental acts are irreducible to material causes; that consciousness, intentionality, and mental unity aren’t physical phenomena or emergent products of material forces, but instead belong to a reality more basic than the physical order; that the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for roughly four centuries is incoherent and inadequate to all the available empirical evidence; that in fact the foundation of all reality is spiritual rather than material, and that the material order, to the degree that it exists at all (on which we may reserve judgment), originates in the spiritual; that all rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God” (pp. 28-29).

Human consciousness cannot be observed by an outsider.  It’s “an awareness of being aware: an illumination from within, a mysterious reflexivity or doubleness, not merely registering impressions from without, but experiencing itself as experiencing” (p. 126).   It can only be described by persons aware of it.  It’s a “first person” phenomenon, known only to an individual thinking about himself, “wholly inaccessible to any scrutiny from outside” (p. 35).  It’s the only world we truly know, for it resides within us.  It’s subjectively experienced, innately known.  To materialists the mind is nothing more than the brain, which “is entirely determined by mindless impulses and momentums rather than by rationales or purposes” (p. 46).  But that doesn’t fit we’ll with what we intuitively know.  For example, our bodies, with their “capacities for growth, regeneration, reproduction, homeostasis, and responsiveness to mental intentions” must certainly be more than a “mere machine” (p. 51).  Virtually none of the ancient thinkers “could have conceived of the body or the cosmos as a machine; they saw matter as being always already informed by indwelling rational causes, and thus open to—and in fact directed toward and filled with—mind” (p. 65).  

They fully understood that it is “very difficult to say how mind can inhabit a world whose deepest reality is that of a mindless machine; but there are countless ways of coherently imagining how a world whose deepest reality is that of an integral phenomenal and rational structure should inhabit mind.  Maybe, then, we’ll find reasons to conclude that it’s only by inhabiting mind that the world exists at all” (p. 99).

Interestingly enough, Hart thinks the ancient philosophers would easily embrace some of the recent findings of quantum physics!  (And there is a certain kinship between the “prime matter” of Aristotle and the quantum realm!)  The materialistic god in the dialogues, Hephaestus, recognizes that Psyche (and Hart) are ultimately trying to “get us to the mind of God,” who gives rational structure to the cosmos—

“the Old One’s great thought.”  To which Psyche (and Hart) declare:  ‘Well, in a word, yes.’” (p. 104).  Yes to the Logos who’s made it all.   

The Democrat Party’s nominee for mayor of New York City is Zohran Mamdani, a 33 year old anti-semitic Muslim who was born in Uganda but immigrated to the United States with his parents.  His mother is a noted film director, his father a professor at Columbia University.  His prosperous parents sent him to prestigious schools, including Bowdoin College, but he won the mayoral primary claiming to be a man of the people.  He worked as a housing counselor and musician before winning a seat in the New York State Assembly.  He then won the city primary by promising a bundle of left-wing goals such as affordable housing, free public buses, city owned grocery stores,  raising taxes on corporations and white neighborhoods.  As a self-proclaimed socialist he rather represents (and is significantly supported by) America’s millennials and indicates the power of Marxism in large sectors of the nation.  

To better understand why so many Americans support socialists such as Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders, I read Nathan Robinson’s Why You Should Be a Socialist (New York:  St. Martin’s Publishing Group, c. 2019; Kindle Edition).  Robinson is a graduate of Yale Law School an founder/editor of a magazine, Current Affairs, who found his political compass in the “occupy wall street” movement and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns.  (Much of this book was first written as articles for his magazine).   He writes to persuade us that the Left’s agenda is the only right one.  Though he prefers to label himself a “democratic socialist” he could easily be taken for a communist, though he does express his distress over what happened in Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Venezuela, etc.  He’s a socialist, he says, because he’s outraged by injustices of various sorts—poverty, homelessness, children dying, unequal schools, racism, national borders—and cannot rest until they are rectified.  He wants us to dream big dreams—admittedly utopian dreams—and then work to make the world a wonderful place.  

Robinson devotes chapters to denouncing liberalism and conservatism, Neo-liberalism and free enterprise capitalism.  Though reluctantly admitting much good has transpired in American history, overall things have turned out poorly for the poor.  He thinks only socialism provides an ethical social philosophy.  It “leads not just to substantive convictions, but to radical ideas about how the world ought to and can be.  From its humanitarian sympathies, it derives a vision:  it seeks a world in which people do not go to war; there are no class, racial, and gender hierarchies; there are no significant imbalances of power; there is no poverty coexisting alongside wealth; and everyone leads a pleasant and fulfilled life.  That’s not the world we currently live in, which is unequal, violent, and full of poor people.  Socialists will not rest until we have averted environmental catastrophe and eliminated suicide, malnourishment, and tyranny, whether that of the autocrat or of the boss. That’s ambitious, but it’s hardly some vague statement about loving the underdog” (p. 109).  

There’s no transcendent or religious dimension to this book, no reason given as to why one should support Robinson’s agenda.  He’s an outspoken atheist, acknowledging there’s no clue in the cosmos as to why we’re here or what we should do.  So it’s ironic but enlightening to find Robinson quoting one of the most pessimistic philosophers in history, Arthur Schopenhauer, who, in The Basis of Morality, provides what passes for Robinson’s ethicalal foundation:  “Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry.  Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man’s rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.”  In short, Schopenhauer cited an old East Indian prayer:  ‘‘May all living beings be delivered from pain.’  Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.”  

You Should Be a Socialist is not a deeply philosophical or persuasive treatise, but it is well-written and informative, giving insight into the reasons so many Americans (especially young, unmarried people like Robinson) support the position.  

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Responding to the growing popularity and power of socialism and representing a goodly number of conservative women, Liz Wheeler has written Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Publishers, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  Wheeler hosts a popular podcast but does serious research in order to give her presentation credibility.  She writes because she believes the U.S., “its history, its founding ideals, and its moral fabric” are endangered.  “The insanity aimed at our children in public schools, in science and medicine, from corporations, on social media, in government, and in entertainment is escalating.  The left is waging a deliberate, relentless attack on our children” (p. x).  Still more:  “The left has torched the nuclear family as outdated and oppressive, redefined marriage, substituted the relativism of ‘gender’ in place of the reality of sex, restricted political free speech, vilified religion as a haven of bigotry, trashed our shared patriotic history, and denied that there is such a thing as objective truth.  They have taught this at all levels of education—including elementary schools, high schools, and universities—across the country” (p. xi).  We need to wake up and realize that this is being deliberately done by full-fledged Marxists.

They are not the Marxists who staged the Russian Revolution a century ago.  They are modern Marxists implementing the ideas of Antonio Gramsci—an Italian who proposed slowly infiltrating institutions rather than staging armed upheavals.  His theories weren’t well known in America until a Notre Dame professor, Joseph Buttigieg (the father of President Biden’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg) translated Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks 30 years ago.  “Gramsci identified many pillars of culture that need to be attacked in order to tear down the norms on which the proletariat relies, but chief among them were religion, family, education, media, and law” (p. 5).

Wheeler believes American Marxists have successfully subverted the churches, the schools, the media, and law.  Only the traditional, nuclear family still stands—and it is under vicious attack.  Marx and Engles and most utopian socialists deeply disliked it, as did Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex and Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, which quickly sold millions of copies and ignited a radical feminist movement that had far-reaching consequences.  Frieden “decried marriage and motherhood” and urged women to escape their cages by pursuing careers and shunning traditional norms.  Though she pretended to simply be an unhappy housewife, Frieden was in fact a radical agitator, a deeply committed Marxist.  Women following her changed the country.  Consequently:  “In 1960, about 5 percent of American births were to unmarried women.  Since then, that number has octupled to about 40 percent.  It’s also true, as the Center for Children and Families notes, that, ’70% percent of gang members, high school dropouts, teen suicides, teen pregnancies and teen substance abusers come from single mother homes’” (p. 29). 

One disturbing consequence of the war against the family is its impact upon men.  “Toxic masculinity” has become an anathema to be hurled at men doing manly things.  Thus the wife of California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said that boys should never be  urged “to be a man.”  Compared to girls, today’s boys do poorly in schools, get lower grades, are less likely to attend college, and are more likely to drop out.  Unmarried women now earn more than their male counterparts.  Men are more likely to commit suicide, do drugs, and have a lower life-expectancy than women.  No longer expected to marry and have children, no longer admired for protecting and providing for their wives, young men are confused and unsure where they fit into their world.  “Marxists understand that masculinity is a problem, something that needs to be undermined.  Destroy men, destroy their role as a protector—a defender of a wife, children, society—and you can then overthrow that society” (p. 39).

Homosexuals have clearly played a prominent role in subverting the traditional family.  Linking hands with radical feminists they have successfully insisted we use “gender” rather than “sex” when referring to men and women, and they claim that “gender” is self-affirmed rather than biologically given.  A spokesmen for this position, Gayle Rubin, “argues for gender ‘identities’ without essence—across a wide and fluid gender spectrum unrelated to biological sex.  This is the basis of gender identity.  Rubin says that ‘gender’ is merely a social construct, and therefore mutable, as changeable as we desire.  Finally, Rubin encourages transgression, which is a fancy way of claiming that no sexual behavior is immoral as long as it is consensual.  This area of Queer Theory is deeply disturbing, especially in its consequences for children, as we’ll soon see.  Queer Theory is an offshoot of Marxist Critical Theory, and like Critical Race Theory, is a rejection of objective reality” (p. 59).  

Public schools easily embrace critical theories in part because they follow the agenda of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist who exemplified today’s “woke” culture.  In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire proposed replacing traditional curricula—a “banking method” emphasizing memorization, grammar, mathematical formulae, etc.—with  critical thinking in order to dismantle the status quo and prepare for a fairer world through revolution.  Teachers should work alongside students, becoming “co-learners” rather than authorities, concerned more with changing the world than understanding it.  “Freire wanted to reeducate children to view the world through the lens of Critical Theory, destroy objective reality, replace truth with relativism, divide society into an oppressor class versus an oppressed class, and agitate for Marxist revolution.  Freire wanted to ‘awaken’ children’s ‘critical consciousness’ to see the world through a Marxist filter. American citizens who today accept ‘wokeness’ are in fact accepting Freire’s Marxist worldview” (p. 108).  In many of our schools, his ideas take the form of “social justice” or “social-emotional learning” (SEL) emphases and pervade a variety of courses.  

The current president of the California State Board of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond is one of the most influential educators in America who lectures across the nation, frequently citing Freire.  The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal says she “is one of the most assigned authors in the education departments at leading universities.”  She was an education advisor to Barack Obama and served on Joe Biden’s 2020 transition team.  Equally significant is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union.  As was clear during the COVID panic, when she insisted public schools close, she is a powerful lobbyist who funds ($44 million a year) dozens of Democrat politicians.   She’s “a middle-aged lesbian ‘married’ to a lesbian rabbi famous for her LGBTQ+ activism” (p. 114).  She “openly pushes neo-Marxist agendas in schools” and represents everything Wheeler opposes.  Yet another lesbian, Emily Drabinski, is the president of the American Library Association and routinely identifies as a Marxist.  is an open, self-proclaimed Marxist.  With women such as these shaping the educational philosophy of the public schools, it’s no surprise to find Wheeler promoting home-schooling.  

To protect our children, Wheeler says we must first be realistic regarding the state of the schools.  She cites the famous words of Ronald Reagan, who said, in 1961:  “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”  If we admit that the Marxists have gained significant traction in the schools, we must fight them by recovering the philosophical foundations of our founding fathers—John Locke, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, et al.  

More importantly, we must work to restore our Christian foundations.  The real battle, Wheeler believes, is between good and evil.  In 1878 Pope Leo XIII condemned socialism as a “deadly plague that is creeping into the very fibers of human society and leading it on to the verge of destruction.”  Fifty years later Pope Pius XI said:  “The evil we must combat is at its origin primarily an evil of the spiritual order.  From this polluted source the monstrous emanations of the communistic system flow with satanic logic.”  Indeed, he continued:  “Communism is by its nature anti-religious.  It considers religion as ‘the opiate of the people’ because the principles of religion which speak of a life beyond the grave dissuade the proletariat from the dream of a Soviet paradise which is of this world.”  To combat communism we need to restore the “natural law” to its proper place, well embedded in the Christian tradition and markedly evident in the words of this nation’s Founders.  

There’s lots to be done and lots of places where we can improve things.  Simply going to church and practicing you faith is an important step!  Healthy churches make for healthy communities.  Homeschooling where possible or holding school boards accountable is also needed.  Opposing various “social justice” programs is essential—whether in schools or corporations or government agencies.  Be realistic but not pessimistic!  There is in fact much that can be done and much to hope for.  Concerned parents will benefit from Liz Wheeler’s data and arguments in Hide Your Children. 

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Mark Levin thinks we are in the midst of a “counter-revolution” designed to overturn the 18th century American Revolution which gave us our constitutional republic, and makes his case in American Marxism (New York:  Simon & Schuster, c. 2021; Kindle Edition).  The current variety of Marxism enlists utopian dreamers who think they can create a wonderful world if only they gain power as well as discontented persons and groups motivated by envy and the desire to destroy whatever displeases them.  Noting the presence of mobs led by Antifa and BLM, Levin takes to their philosophical architects—Rousseau, Hegel, Marx—who inspired American progressives a century ago.  They were committed to the redistribution of wealth, and John Dewey clearly embodied them, exercising enormous influence over the nation’s government and schools.  To him Marx rightly raised critical questions and set forth proper proposals regarding economics and politics.  He believed that, as he wrote in Individualism, Old and New:  “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please,” because Marx’s theory of economic determinism shaped by class struggle “is now a fact, not a theory and a central planning should be the way forward.  Dewey was a professor of education, and his Marxist notions are alive and well in today’s schools and universities.  

Marx famously said:  “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”  His followers look for opportunities to do so and today, in America, they frequently focus on racial tensions, declaring minorities suffer a variety of injustices.  Following the precepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT), thinkers such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi view America as a country dominated by whites who exploit blacks.  “Individual behavior is insignificant because everyone in America functions within a society of systemic racism, structural racism, and institutional racism” (p. 87).  Any disparity (wealth, education, employment, crime) results solely from racism.  Illustrating CRT is the 1619 Project, set forth in a series of essays in the New York Times, declaring that when slaves arrived in Virginia this nation was founded.  The story of America is a story of oppressed people doing the work that made it.  Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead author of creator of the 1619 Project, without citing sources or interacting with scholarly historians, claims that virtually everything in this country—minimum wages, prisons, highways, you name it—is tainted by the legacy of slavery.  

Equally rooted in Marxism is the radical environmentalism that shaped the “Green New Deal” legislation championed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Democrat colleagues.  Though overtly concerned with the natural world, its real intent was to establish “environmental justice” and socialism.  This is clearly evident in a 2014 document called the Margarita Declaration on Climate Change that began with a statement by Venezuela’s late Marxist dictator, Hugo Chávez.  Disregarding the plight of Venezuela under his rule, the declaration called us to live in “‘harmony with nature, guided by absolute and ecological sustainability limits,” establishing  “a fair, egalitarian model that constructs sustainable economies” untethered to fossil fuels, and securing respect  for “Mother Earth, the rights of women, children, adolescents, gender diversity, the impoverished, the vulnerable minority groups and the original indigenous peoples—A fair and egalitarian model that fosters the peaceful coexistence of our peoples’” (p. 164).  Responding to such rhetoric,  Ian Plimer, a distinguished Australian scientist, declares:  “‘Climate change catastrophism is the biggest scientific fraud that has ever occurred.   Much climate ‘science’ is political ideology dressed up as science’” (p. 173).  (Years ago I abandoned the Sierra Club and similar environmental organizations when it became clear to me that they were more concerned with social change than conservation.) 

Levin’s work certainly exposes many issues that should concern us and offers suggestions as to how we should react—especially in areas such as education.                                     

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While reading contemporary treatises on the socialism, I found it interesting to explore Fulton J. Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West, (first published in 1948 and recently re-issued by Cluny Press, c. 2022; Kindle Edition.)   He believed:  ‘The ideology of Communism rose out of the secularized remnants of a Western civilization whose soul was once Christian” (p. 10).  Having abandoned the Christian Faith, it proposes a this-worldly faith.  It “gave the European man a religion; a counterchurch to supplant a Church, a faith to fight the Faith; the inspired gospel of Marx for the abandoned Gospel of Mark; a god of earth for a God of Heaven, a new mystical body with its visible head not in Rome but in Moscow, infallible when he speaks ex cathedra on the subject of politics and economics; and also an invisible head too terrible to be named” (p. 167).  Communism is not simply an economic or political position—it is a false religion that exercises great power  Consequently the world is divided between between those who believe in “the absolute who is the God-man, and the absolute which is the man-God; the God who became man, and the man who makes himself God; brothers in Christ and comrades in Antichrist” (p. 19).  

Sheen sketches the historical roots of Communism, concluding that the “philosophy of dialectical materialism is nothing but a crazy quilt made up of patches of Hegel and Feuerbach sewed together to cover up the nakedness of its own ideas” (p. 73).  As is evident in the many citations Sheen provides, Communists excel in criticism and destruction of the status quo but fail to create and maintain healthy societies.  Its basic defect is its effort “to establish the impossible: a brotherhood of man without a fatherhood of God” (p. 95).  To do Marx and Engels vigorously assailed the family as the basic (and only truly natural) unit of society.  Sadly enough, Sheen lamented, the same philosophy is at work in America, evident in divorce, living together rather than marrying, and choosing to not have children.  In this arena, the ideology off the Communists has gained control of America’s conscience.  

The answer to the Communist threat, Sheen says, is found in the Church.  Nations rise and fall, as do civilizations.  But the Church continually rises again from the ashes, proclaiming its eternal Truth, that Jesus ever lives and the Kingdom of God is the only thing worth living for. 

That most unlikely source for spiritual direction, Mick Jagger, once penned these lines:  “Don’t want to talk about Jesus; just want to see his face.”  That’s truly what we need, says Rod Dreher, who, following a successful journalistic career, has lately been exploring the deeper life in works such as The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies.  He’s recently published Living in Wonder:  Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2024; Kindle Edition), wherein he urges “the return of strong religion—one that makes demands, offers compelling explanations to the problems of death and suffering, and gives worshipers a visceral sense of connecting to the living God—has any hope of competing in the post-Christian marketplace” (p. 79).  He begins with a testimony from a lawyer who struggled with demons before finding help with a Catholic exorcist; he said:  “‘Not only did they [the demons] not drive me away from Jesus, they’ve actually brought me closer to him.  This whole thing has made me understand that materialism is false.  The world is not what we think it is.’  That phrase is at the core of this book. This is a book about living in a world filled with mystery.  It is about learning to open our eyes to the reality of the world of spirit and how it interacts with matter.  This is a world that many Christians affirm exists in theory but have trouble accepting in practice” (p. 3).  

To Dreher:  “The point cannot be overstated: the world is not what we think it is. It is so much weirder.  It is so much darker.  It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful. We do not create meaning; meaning is already there, waiting to be discovered.  Christians of the first millennium knew this.  We have lost that knowledge, abandoned faith in this claim, and forgotten how to search.  This is a mass forgetting compelled by the forces that forged the modern world and taught us that enchantment was for primitives.  Exiled from the truths that the old ones knew, we fill our days with distractions to help us avoid the hard questions that we fear can’t be answered.  Or we give ourselves over to false enchantments—the distractions and deceptions of money, power, the occult, sex, drugs, and all the allure of the material world—in a vain attempt to connect with something beyond ourselves to give meaning and purpose to life.  Very well: this book will show you how to seek, and how to find” (p. 13).

Reared Roman Catholic, Dreher has embraced Eastern Orthodoxy, but he writes not to explain or defend that tradition.  The book is, he says, “about the profoundly human need to believe that we live and move and have our being in the presence of God—not just the idea of God, but the God who is as near to us as the air we breathe, the light we see, and the solid ground on which we walk.”  He, invoking  C. S. Lewis, wants us to recover a healthy slice of the Medieval perspective, seeing all things visible and invisible deeply rooted in God.  In that age of faith:  “All things have ultimate meaning because they participated in the life of the Creator” (p. 8).  They believed “heaven and earth interpenetrate each other, participate in each other’s life. The sacred is not inserted from outside, like an injection from the wells of paradise; it is already here, waiting to be revealed” (p. 11).

Dreher himself owes his “faith to walking into an old French church on a summer’s day in 1984.  I was a bored seventeen-year-old American, the only young person on a coach full of elderly tourists, and I could barely stand the tedium of the long bus ride to Paris.  I followed the old folks into the church, because the prospect of sitting on the bus was even more dull.  The church was the Chartres Cathedral, the medieval masterpiece that is one of the most glorious churches in all of Christendom.  But I didn’t know that at the time. I stood there in the center of the labyrinth on the nave gazing up at the soaring vaults, the kaleidoscopic stained glass, and the iconic rose window and felt all my teenaged agnosticism evaporate.  I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was real, and that he wanted me. I remember nothing else about the entire vacation, which was my first trip to Europe, but I can never forget Chartres, because it was where my pilgrimage to a mature faith in God began” (p. 12).

Recovering a sacramental vision, finding Christ as a living reality, is what the world desperately needs.  As Dante’s Beatrice said in Paradiso:  “Open your eyes; see what I am.”   Dreher believes the modern, technologically sophisticated world has hardened the human heart.  “Martin Heidegger, arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, reached the end of his life in despair about humanity’s capacity to govern its technology.  In a 1966 article published after his death, Heidegger bleakly stated that ‘only a god can save us’ from our out-of-control technology” (p. 136).  Dreher agrees:  “Ours is a rich, decadent, spiritually exhausted civilization” (p. 65).  We have sacrificed finding meaning in the cosmos for getting power over it.  We were not created to live in the internet/smartphone world we’ve manufactured.  It’s truly a world filled with multiple towers of Babel.  To re-enter the world wherein we were created means to repent, to change our minds in radical ways, to learn how to directly perceive what is rather than stand apart and think abstractly about it.  

This means we must learn to love enough to be attentive, for “what we pay attention to, and how we attend—is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment.  And prayer is the most important part of the most important part” (p. 138).  Thinking and talking about God is worthwhile but not ultimately sufficient.  We need to learn how to talk with and listen to Him.  Should we need help doing so, there is a rich devotional tradition in the Christian Church easily accessed.  Catholics and Orthodox and Evangelicals should simply follow the masters of the spiritual life and learn how to pray well.  Attending to Beauty is also important.  The beauties of the natural world, the work of gifted musicians and artists enable us to hear and see better.  “True beauty is the visible manifestation of a prayer that has tuned in to the divine frequency and transmits grace to those who harmonize with it” (p. 167).  Great works of art, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, provide what Charles Williams called the “‘way of affirmation’—the path to unity with God through the recognition and celebration of the goodness in the world.  In Dante’s poem, Beatrice is the bearer of God’s light.  Through contemplating her beautiful image, the lost and broken poet learns to see through her to the everlasting God’” (p. 169),

After positively exploring the “signs and wonders” frequently mentioned by devout Christians, Dreher tells stories of some men “who have found in the mystical thought and practices of the ancient Christian East a way of life with compelling answers to the challenges of our troubled time” (p. 212).  For example, Martin Shaw is an English writer who felt led to spend night hours in the woods near his house.  Gazing into the night sky he found himself in the presence of something mysteriously compelling.  He found himself saying:  “‘Thank you for giving me this time with you—whatever “you” is—and if there’s anything you would like me to see, I’m absolutely at your mercy this evening’” (p. 21).  He suddenly was overwhelmed by Light.  And with the light came a deep sense of joy.  Then he began to have dreams full of significant imagery.  Ultimately:  “The signs pointing to Christ were so overwhelming that Shaw surrendered.  In the early spring of 2022, he became a Christian, receiving baptism in the River Dart, which he said felt like being hit with a bolt of electricity” (p. 215).

Then there’s Paul Kingsnorth, a novelist who has gained considerable attention as “the Man Against the Machine.”  Living in rural England, he says:  “‘My connection to God comes through nature, fundamentally.  I’ve had from a very early age this sense that it’s alive, and we’re connected to it, and that we live in a society that denies this and is destroying it’” (p. 221).  He thinks the modern world is destroying both the natural world and man’s soul.  Ultimately he joined an Orthodox church because it promotes the view that God is “everywhere present and filling all things.”  One can, as Kallistos Ware said, go “through creation to the Creator.”  So Kingsnorth encourages folks to get outside, walk in the woods, gaze at the stars, and find a “wholeness” the modern world obscures.  

Doing so will connect us with the mystical tradition of the Church that teaches:  “We live not in an impersonal universe but in a divinely ordered cosmos permeated by Logos” (p. 239).  In short, says Dreher:  “We Christians have a mission to focus our attention on Christ and to create the conditions for the flow of divine energy—of grace—to purify the eyes of our hearts so that we can see the holiness all around us and share in the life of God.  To accomplish this, we have to learn how to sacrifice, die to ourselves, and fix our personal swords, as symbols of our will, into the stone of God as an act of faithful obedience. We have to learn how to direct our attention rightly, pray more effectively, and reestablish resonance with the world beyond our heads.  We have to discover how to open our eyes to beauty and allow it to work its magic on us, drawing us into a deeper relationship with reality” (p. 256).  

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Before becoming a Christian, Lee Strobel was the legal editor of The Chicago Tribune,  Following his conversion he began writing books based on interviews with some of the world’s finest scholars that made him an influential apologist.  These include The Case for Christ, The Case for a Creator, and Is God Real?  His most recent work is Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2025; Kindle Edition).  He endeavors to show that “we can reasonably conclude from the evidence that the supernatural realm is real” (p. xx).  .

One of the most persuasive evidences of a non-material world is our own mind.  Dogmatic materialists such as Daniel Dennett insist “‘there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon’” (p. 4).  But careful examination of the evidence leads many fine scholars to differ and think there is a spiritual aspect to our consciousness demonstrating the reality of a supernatural world.  We are souls as well as bodies.  To discuss this issue Strobel interviewed Sharon Dirckx, an Oxford scholar who since childhood has been pondering how we think, how we interpret our experiences and has written Am I Just My Brain?  Asked if the brain and mind are the same thing, she said no.  Scientists can study the brain, but they cannot touch or measure thoughts or personal decisions demonstrating free will.  “‘The problem is that scientists can’t access a person’s actual inner thoughts or qualia without simply asking them.  A person’s thoughts defy traditional scientific methods’” (p. 10).  After talking with Dirckx and reading about human consciousness Strobel concluded:  “For me, the case had been made.  I am more than just my body.  My soul is distinct from my brain.  To paraphrase J. P. Moreland:  I am a soul, and I have a body.  It opens the door to the possibility that when my body breathes its last in this world, I can actually live on” (p. 19).

Strobel had earlier published a book titled The Case for Miracles, and he returns to this phenomenon on the second chapter of Seeing the Supernatural.  So he interviewed Craig Keener, the author of Miracles, a two volume, 1,172 page treatise.  Ben Witherington III considers it “perhaps the best book ever written on miracles in this or any age” (p. 24).  Keener provided a number of well-documented illustrations of contemporary miracles.  One of the most astounding involved a woman named Barbara, who had suffered from progressive multiple sclerosis.  Doctors at the Mayo Clinic and other physicians declared her “hopelessly ill.”  She suffered for 16 years, went blind, needed a feeding tube, and couldn’t walk for seven years.  Ultimately she was placed in hospice care, expected to die within six months.  Then Christians prayed for her and on Pentecost Sunday in 1981, “Barbara heard a man’s voice speak from behind her—even though there was nobody else in the room.”  He said:  “‘My child, get up and walk!’”  And she did.  She “‘literally jumped out of bed and removed her oxygen.  She was standing on legs that had not supported her for years.  Her vision was back, and she was no longer short of breath, even without her oxygen.’”  That evening she attended a service in the Wheaton Wesleyan church her family attended, and the next day she saw her doctor, who exclaimed:  “‘I thought I was seeing an apparition! . . . .  No one had ever seen anything like this before’” (p. 32).  She is now living in Virginia, so Strobel went to see her and confirm her story.   And confirm it she did.  Given this and many more miracles, Keener said:  “‘It looks like God is still in the miracle business.” Pausing for a moment, he concluded:  “At least, that’s an entirely reasonable hypothesis from the evidence” (p. 41).  

“Life-changing spiritual encounters” provide even more evidence of the supernatural.  “The daredevil motorcyclist Evel Knievel, a womanizer and drunkard who once went to prison for beating up a business partner with a baseball bat, was on the beach in Florida when he felt God ‘speak’ to him on the inside:  ‘Robert, I’ve saved you more times than you’ll ever know.  Now I need you to come to me through my Son Jesus.’  Knievel was stunned.  He sought out a book on the historical evidence for Jesus and ended up experiencing a radical conversion to Christ.  When he told his story at his baptism, seven hundred people responded by receiving Jesus as their forgiver and leader.  Knievel died about a year later, and at his request his tombstone is etched with the words ‘Believe in Jesus Christ’” (p. 48).  To evaluate such testimonies, Strobel interviewed Doug Groothuis, who said that when numbers of trustworthy people have significant “numinous experiences” they deserve respect, for their words are “corroborative.” 

Corroborative is the right word to use for Strobel’s book, for he explores all sorts of evidences for the reality of the supernatural—angels and demons, dreams and vision, death-bed revelations and near-death experiences.  He knows how to conduct interviews and turn them into readable prose.  

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A decade ago Ross Dauthat, the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for The New York Times and a practicing Catholic, wrote Bad Religion:  How We Became a Nation of Heretics.  He argued:  “America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe.  Rather, it’s bad religion:  the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities.”  Back then he seemed concerned with the integrity of Christianity, but in his latest treatise, Believe:  Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan Books, c. 2025; Kindle Edition) he seems to recommend almost any sort of religion so long as it gives one a meaningful worldview—though he concludes his treatise with a personal testimony explaining why he finds Catholicism true.  He defines religion as “a system of belief and practice that tries to connect human beings to a supernatural order, that offers moral guidance in this world and preparation for the possible hereafter, and that tries to explain both the order of the world and the destiny of humankind” (p. 8).  Whatever enables one to think better and find reasons to be a good person is worth embracing.

That secularism has been gaining ground in America most everyone acknowledges.  But in recent decades there has appeared a fault line in that edifice.  Increasing numbers of people have “seemed to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default, not a freely chosen liberation.  More and more seemed unhappy with their unbelief” (p. 2).  Many of those who had rejected their religious upbringing are now expressing a hunger for what it had afforded.  They need what they had rejected as too old-fashioned and irrational.  They are “Serious Modern Persons Who Can’t Believe in Magical Nonsense.”  So they’re not quite willing to accept the possibility “that faith in its traditional form could accurately describe reality, that the God of the old-time sort of religion—supernaturalist and scriptural religion, angels-and-miracles religion, Jesus-was-resurrected religion—might actually exist, that religious belief might be not only socially or psychologically desirable but also an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality and the destiny of humankind.”  So Dautat has written Believe because he thinks  “the time seems ripe to argue exactly that” (p. 3).

This is so because religion (at its best) invokes reason to guide us godward.  Great minds throughout the ages have said this, but you don’t need to be a world-class philosopher to see it.  Ordinary folks, using their God-given minds, can find sufficient evidence in their world to believe God exists and has given us ways to find Him.  Repeatedly Dauthat  argues “that if the religious perspective is correct, its merits—and with them the obligation to take religion seriously—should be readily apparent to a normal person, to a non-genius and non-mystic experiencing human life and observing the basic order of the world.  The skeptic’s question, ‘If some ultimate reality exists, why don’t we know about it?’ should have as its answer that we can know about it, to some degree at least.  Whatever mysteries and riddles inhere in our existence, ordinary reason plus a little curiosity should make us well aware of the likelihood that this life isn’t all there is, that mind and spirit aren’t just an illusion woven by our cells and atoms, that some kind of supernatural power shaped and still influences our lives and universe.  The world as we experience it is not a cruel trick, our conscious experience is not a burst of empty pyrotechnics in an otherwise-illimitable dark, there are signs enough to point us up from materialism and pessimism and reductionism—signs that most past civilizations have observed and followed, signs that we have excellent reasons to follow as well” (p. 7).  

Such excellent reasons become clear when we consider the “fashioned universe” we inhabit.  Increasing numbers of scientists have concluded it looks very much like a “fine tuned” creation.   “The idea that the cosmos was intended, that mind is more fundamental than matter, that our minds in particular have a special relationship to the physical world and its originating Cause—all of these ideas have had their plausibility strengthened, not weakened, by centuries of scientific success” (p. 62).  When you look around at the animal and vegetive worlds  you should be amazed.  But looking at yourself you should rejoice inasmuch as you are perfect wonder to behold—a rational animal!  There is surely something about human beings that long been called the “self or mind or soul or spirit, something extra seems added to the human race, enabling us to understand more of the world than even the most intelligent of our fellow mammals—and also to invent and create within it, imitating the larger system’s order and beauty on the smaller scales of technology and architecture, literature and art” (p. 17).  Still more:  “positing a realm of supernatural mind above and around the realm of matter also explains a third feature of existence that makes your naive religious self feel justified in its beliefs:  the fact the world seems not just ordered but enchanted, with many individually tailored signs of a higher order of reality.  These come through the incredible variety of encounters described by words like spiritual and mystical and numinous, which vindicate religion through direct experience” (p. 18).  Though you may not personally experience it, you would rightly open your mind to the possibility that others have entered into a transcendent dimension of reality.  

Secularists almost uniformly say religion and science don’t mix and only the latter should be trusted.  To Dauthat, however, there is no ultimate conflict between the two.  Indeed, the current understanding of an initial “big bang” is quite compatible with the traditional Christian teaching of creatio ex nihilo.  He says that many pre-modern thinkers believed “that God relies on secondary causes, not just a constant string of miracles, to bring about His intentions in the world,” and thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas set forth “arguments from design” that easily fit into a contemporary scientific perspective. 

 (p. 23).  It’s also most amazing that our “goldilocks universe” looks as if it were specifically designed for us humans!  In Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, physicist Stephen M. Barr listed striking examples of  “anthropic” coincidences necessary for our being here.  The mathematical improbability of all this just happening by chance is overwhelming.    So too there is no purely material explanation for your minds, our self-consciousness.  Only a religious worldview really works!   Dauthat thus ends aligned with the pragmatist William James, who a century ago recommended religion (of any sort) as a key to living well.  

As soon as Joe Biden left the White House, journalists and politicians began acknowledging what many saw clearly years ago:  the president was failing, both physically and mentally.  Though his critics had expressed concerns for several years, leaders of his own party and the mainstream media resolutely insisted he was quite healthy and fully able to carry out the duties of his office.  Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson signal the beginning of what’s sure to be an avalanche of publications in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (New York:  Penguin Press, c. 2025; Kindle Edition).  Tapper, the main writer, is a TV anchor for CNN and very much an insider in Washington, D.C.  Thompson is a CNN contributor.  They interviewed 200 people—mainly prominent Democrats, few of whom wanted to be named—and the book often reads like a litany of quotations lamenting the fact that virtually no one dared tell the truth about an ailing president.  As George Orwell once wrote;  “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.  Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time:  the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”  Still more, said he:  “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”  So Tapper and Thompson now endeavor to tell us “what was in front of our noses” during the Biden years, leaving us wondering why they failed to tell us.

Biden’s “original sin,” say the authors, was his decision to seek reelection in 2024.  He, his family and close advisors, refused to face and tried to hide the fact that he was declining.  They insisted everyone mouth the party line:  Biden’s “‘exactly the same person he always was.  Age is not an issue.  He’s incredibly sharp in meetings. There are no accommodations being made for him because of his age.’  Those answers were not true.” (p. 102).  Then came his disastrous debate with Donald Trump—probably the worst performance of a presidential candidate since the debates began in 1960—and all the world saw the truth.  A frail, often incoherent man was leading the most powerful nation on earth and wanted to keep doing so.  So soon thereafter the power brokers within the Democrat Party began to orchestrate his exit.  They realized, as West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin said,  “there comes a time when you have to tell your dad, ‘It’s time for me to take away the car keys’”  (p. 256).   And (ignoring the party’s primaries) they did!

Original Sin is not a great book.  Better ones will doubtlessly be better.  It’s as much Tapper’s effort to explain why he and his media colleagues failed as an effort to get at the truth.  Hundreds of quotations basically say the same thing—and they almost all claim to have not really known the condition of the president when obviously they should have.  In fact they knew he was ailing but feared to say anything lest they lose their standing within the Democrat Party.  Tapper and they Washington establishment were actually willing to endanger this country while pretending its Chief Executive was doing quite well!

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Unlike Jeff Tapper, Miranda Devine is an independent-minded investigative New York Post journalist who does the hard homework necessary to write solid stories.  She researches and asks critical questions, cites sources and provides meticulous documentation.  Her study of Joe Biden—The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America (New York:  Broadside Books, c. 2024; Kindle Edition)—tells us much we need to know about the former president.  She had earlier published Laptop from Hell, examining Joe’s son Hunter and the Biden family’s involvement in Ukraine and China.  But there’s more to the story—the “coverup” which “is what this book is about.  It is the story of how the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the IRS and the Department of Justice conspired to protect Joe, his crack addict son Hunter and his scandal-prone brother Jim from the consequences of their reckless greed.  The extent and nature of their crimes are coming to light as the United States and the world it leads face grave dangers from the very countries where the Bidens made millions of dollars” (p. xxii).  Corrupt politicians are ever with us, but the Biden family did more—they managed to corrupt several federal bureaucracies.  

As in Laptop from Hell Joe Biden’s son plays a major role in The Big Guy—a title for Joe used by Hunter’s business partners, including Tony Bobulinski.  Hunter’s drug addictions, his sexual adventures, and his compulsive need for large amounts of cash certainly played a prominent role in his father’s life.  But Joe worked with his son in getting money, particularly from partners in Ukraine and China.  A Chinese company, suitably threatened by Joe Biden, sent Hunter a total of $8 million “for services rendered” while Joe was Vice President.  “So much for Joe’s claim in the 2020 campaign:  ‘my son has not made money in terms of this thing about—what are you talking about—China’” (p. 31).  Much of the money surfaced after Joe left the vice presidency; “Six weeks after he became a “private citizen” in 2017, “millions started to flow to nine Biden family members” (p 41). 

In her earlier treatise, Devine provided significant evidence showing the Bidens’ financial corruption.  We found therein  “corporate documents, bank transfers, and emails detailing a vast international influence-peddling scheme, sanctioned by the world’s most despotic regimes—and implicating ‘Honest Joe’ Biden himself.  It would provide a window onto the corruption that is Washington’s original sin, as conducted on a global scale by one of its most skilled and calculating practitioners” (p. 9).  Laptop from Hell gave us glimpses into “the Biden family business, involving the president’s brothers as well as Hunter” from 2010 to 2019, detailing “Joe’s life as the globe-trotting vice president of the Obama administration, the favor-trading senator from Delaware who would go on to become leader of the free world.  The laptop also puts the lie to President Biden’s repeated claims that he knew nothing about his son’s shady business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, and beyond” (p. 11).  He was a discreet but deeply involved player in Hunter’s endeavors.  This was simply part of the “Delaware Way” whereby Joe Biden (for four decades) “had leveraged a quid pro quo system of cronyism and trading favors for political influence” (p. 57).  As  Vice President, Joe determined to “extend the ‘Delaware Way’ template internationally by using his son (often assisted by Joe’s devoted younger brother Jim) as bagman for family.  During his decades as a senator, “Joe had become expert at not getting caught doing anything illegal or too obviously unethical.  Never be too greedy, never leave a trail, never say too much—and always, but always, play the sympathy card if the heat comes on” (p. 58).  He carefully cultivated his public persona as an honest man with a wholesome family. 

Privately, however, Biden wanted to head up a Delaware version of the Kennedy clan.  “He constructed a mythical persona full of tall tales of derring-do, exaggerations, and outright lies about his accomplishments.  He lied about nonexistent academic awards and scholarships.  He plagiarized speeches willy-nilly, and in one infamous case, appropriated the personal life story of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, pretending that he, too, was descended from coal miners and was the first in his family to get a college degree ‘in a thousand generations.’  He routinely repeated far-fetched stories with himself as the big guy, including a favorite in which he single-handedly faced down a ‘bad dude’ named ‘Corn Pop’ who was armed with a straight razor and ‘ran a bunch of bad boys.’  He pretended that he trained as a racial activist in black churches, claimed he was at the center of the civil rights movement in Selma and Birmingham, and stated he had been arrested in Soweto on his way to see Nelson Mandela in prison.  None of it was true.  Each lie served to boost his ego, to place him as the shining superhero of every grandiose story, smarter, tougher, more honorable than anyone, with the best marriage, the best children, the best house, the best life” (p. 77).

Back to The Big Guy!  Miranda reassesses the cultural elites’ reaction to her 2020 New York Post articles.  “There was,” she says, “a whole constellation of government and private organizations that came together to pre-bunk and then crush the story of alleged Biden corruption, illustrating what one journalist called the “Censorship Industrial Complex” (p. 135).  Anthony Blinken, who would become Joe Biden’s secretary of state, “set in motion one of the most brazen dirty tricks in US electoral history.  Using the intelligence community to sound the false alarm of ‘Russian disinformation,’ ground already prepared by corrupt elements inside the FBI, he set out to discredit the whole laptop story” (p. 140).  He persuaded 51 prominent, retired members of the CIA and FBI to sign a letter claiming Russia was somehow responsible for the laptop and it certainly helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.   

One congressman concerned by the Bidens’ financial affairs was Kentucky’s James Comer.  Given his background in banking he understood the complex records covering their endeavors.  The more corruption he found “and the closer he got to Joe, the more vicious and personal were the attacks from opposition research groups funded by deep-pocketed Democrat dark money groups that were supporting Joe and Hunter” (p. 68).   But the facts roared like thunder.  “Comer’s committee produced five detailed ‘Bank Memorandums’ in 2023 tracing some of the millions of dollars in foreign money that had flowed through the accounts and laying out the opaque corporate structure of shell companies associated with the Bidens, most of which were formed in Delaware during the eight years of Joe’s vice presidency” (p. 68).  Before Joe announced his run for the presidency in 2016, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, Dr. Gal Luft, tried to inform the DOJ about the Biden’s “shady business with China” (p. 85).   “Luft told them about the millions of dollars CEFC had paid Hunter and Jim Biden, and that Biden family associate Rob Walker was involved in distributing the payments, a fact later corroborated by bank records subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee” (p. 87).  But rather than follow up on this lead, the DOJ turned on Luft and tried to prosecute him for various misdeeds.  

Shortly before the 2020 election a former Hunter Biden business associate, Tony Bobulinski, went public with details concerning the family’s China connections.  The FBI had told Bobulinski “not to walk in the front door when he came for a ‘proffer’ interview to warn them about his former business partner Hunter Biden’s lucrative deals with China, and the potential compromise of his father, who might soon be president.”  He entered a nondescript office rather than the official FBI facility.  A day earlier he “had appeared in Nashville at a press conference before the final presidential debate, as a ‘special guest’ of the Trump campaign to corroborate the New York Post’s reporting from Hunter’s laptop about Joe’s alleged involvement in his son’s seeming foreign influence peddling operation” (p. 150).   He disputed Joe Biden’s claims to have no role in his son’s business deals.  He said he had “first-hand” knowledge to the contrary, having dealt personally with Joe as well as Hunter.  “In fact, Hunter often referred to his father as ‘the big guy’ or ‘my chairman’” (p. 153).  Though Bobulinski’s words were largely disregarded by most of the media in 2020, he would, in 2024, testify before Congress:  “From my direct personal experience . . . it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family. Joe Biden was more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability. The only reason any of these international business transactions took place—with tens of millions of dollars flowing directly to the Biden family—was because Joe Biden was in high office.  The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period” (p. 163).            

In addition to Bobulinski, Devon Archer provided details regarding the Bidens.  One of Hunter ’s closest business associates, Archer went to prison for crimes committed after the two parted ways.  Hoping to shorten his sentence, Archer offered to testify before the congressional Oversight Committee and “testified that Hunter put his VP dad on the speakerphone more than 20 times during meetings with foreign clients.  The very point of getting Joe on the phone was to demonstrate that his important father was available at a moment’s notice to chat with the shady oligarchs in Paris or Dubai or Lake Como who showered Hunter with millions of dollars and lavish gifts.  ‘You do a favor for me you are my friend; you do a favor for my son, and you are a friend for life’ was one of Joe’s favorite sayings, according to Archer.  He would repeat the phrase time and again to his son’s business partners. It left nobody in any doubt that paying money to Hunter was the equivalent of paying it to Joe, only better” (p. 252).  Archer believed Joe was the titular head of the family business and oversaw a process garnering millions of dollars for its coffers.           

Devine devotes a number of chapters to the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country with which Joe Biden had extensive involvements.  Hunter wanted to get appointed to the board of Burisma, an energy company, providing an $83,333 monthly payment.  Soon after securing his seat, a Burisma executive urged him to “use your influence” in Washington to promote the company.  In Ukraine, a prominent prosecutor, Viktor Slokin, was assigned the task of investigating Burisma.  “He prides himself on his integrity and was not” regarded as corrupt by ordinary Ukrainians during his decades as a prosecutor, a miracle in a country where nothing is as it seems, oligarchs rule the roost, and prosecuting your political opponents is par for the course (p. 291).   Then Vice President Joe Biden flew in and denounced the “cancer of corruption” harming Ukraine, though privately he was working to get Prosecutor General Shokin fired.  Later Biden bragged that he told the Ukrainians:  “‘I’m leaving in six hours.  If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”  (p. 310).  And, sure enough, Shokin was summarily fired. 

Devine considers Shokin a credible witness.  In 2020 he published a book telling his side of the story (which the CIA tried to suppress) entitled:  True Stories Of Joe Biden’s International Corruption In Ukraine or Who Cannot Be The President Of The United States. The next year he talked with Brian Kilmeade on Fox TV and said he was fired “‘at the insistence of the then Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma’ . . .  .  When asked about Devon Archer’s testimony that he was a threat to Burisma, Shokin agreed he was, ‘because [Archer] understood, and so did Vice President Biden, that if I had continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the [allegedly] corrupt activities that they were engaging in.  That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others.’  When asked: ‘Do you believe that Joe Biden or Hunter Biden got bribes?’ Shokin replied, ‘I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my firm personal conviction is that, yes, this was the case’” (p. 334).  

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Miranda Devine’s appraisal of the Bidens is not new.  For years Peter Schweizer has scoured the records of powerful political and business figures, diligently exposing the corruption of both Republicans and Democrats.  He critiqued the Clintons but also exposed Republicans such as Senator Mitch McConnell who had questionable ties to China.  Very much a muckraker, Schweizer doubtlessly seizes upon especially egregious details and probably fails to provide proper contexts, but he does give us the kind of investigative journalism needed to hold the powerful accountable.  The Biden family has appeared in three of his works.      Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption:  The Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2020; Kindle Edition) devotes one chapter to Joe Biden and his “self-enriching” schemes, involving “no less than five family members:  Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie” (p. 48).  In Joe’s endless political campaigns, beginning in 1972, family members served as campaign and finance managers and were richly rewarded for doing so.  “Valerie ran all of his senate campaigns, as well as his presidential runs in 1988 and 2008.  But she was also a senior partner in a political messaging firm named Joe Slade White & Company; the only two executives listed at the firm were Joe Slade White and Valerie.  The firm received large fees from the Biden campaigns that Valerie was running.  Two and a half million dollars in consulting fees flowed to her firm from” contributions for his “2008 presidential bid alone” (p. 54).  Running for the Senate in 1972 Biden admitted he “went to the big guys for the money” and was willing “to prostitute” himself in the process.  This meant delivering the goods the “big guys” wanted.  Predictably, as a senator he routinely supported legislation favoring the corporations chartered in Delaware, including banks, credit card giants, and law firms engaged in lucrative litigation, especially dubious asbestos-damage suits.  He also helped his sons Beau and Hunter get good positions with legal firms or as lobbyists pulling in high-dollar “consulting fees.”              

An illuminating episode showing the Biden family strategy involved StartUp Health, established by three Philadelphia family members.  Obamacare had just been enacted, and various firms were competing to cash in on its provisions.  In 2011 two StartUp executives scored a meeting with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office.  The very next day the company was featured at a HHS conference.  “StartUp Health would continue to enjoy access to the highest levels of the White House as they worked to build up the business.  Indeed, StartUp Health executives became regular visitors to the White House.  Should you wonder why, just note that the chief medical officer of StartUp Health was Howard Krein, who was married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley.  “Advancing the commercial interests of StartUp Health using the Oval Office and Air Force Two would continue over the next half-decade while Biden was in office” (p. 71).  Needless to say, StartUp Health prospered.  As did Ashley Biden!                                

The most recent Schweizer treatise is Red Handed:  How America’s Elites Get Rich Helping China Win (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2022; Kindle Edition), showing how congressmen, Silicon Valley technocrats, Wall Street brokers, diplomats, the Bush and Trouderau “dynasties,” and scores of academics line up get lucrative deals with China.  Leading the crowd, naturally, are the Bidens.  Repeating much of what he detailed in earlier books, Schweizer says the Biden-China ties continued.  Father and son simply follow a “business model offering access to the highest levels of power in Washington in exchange for big-money international deals” (p. 15).  This was evident when, soon after Joe Biden was elected in 2020, a meeting of prominent Chinese businessmen and Communist Party leaders revealed their delight at the good news.  “They smiled, laughed, and applauded as [a respected insider, Di] discussed the global stage and China’s influence in the United States.”  “Old friends” in Washington and on Wall Street, he assured them would prove helpful.  Alluding to the new president’s “son’s deals, the audience laughed knowingly. ‘There are indeed buy-and-sell transactions involved in here, Di added” (p. 10).  Vice President Biden’s door was frequently (if secretly and off-the-books) open to Chinese leaders, and Di obviously expected the pattern would continue while he was president.              Such transactions, Schweizer calculates, have brought the Bidens “some $31 million from Chinese businessmen with very close ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence during and after Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president.  Indeed, as of this writing, some of those financial relationships remain intact.”  Though Hunter Biden was most visible in these endeavors, newly-uncovered documents “provide even more evidence that this is a story about not just Hunter Biden, but Joe Biden himself” (p. 11).  Emails from Hunter show him claiming he gave “Pop” significant sums.  The initials JRB (Joseph Robinette Biden) appear in correspondence discussing money.   For a decade Hunter paid for his father’s multiple private phone lines.  He also paid remodeling costs for Joe’s Delaware home.  As the cascade of data flows on, the pattern gets ever-clearer:  the Biden Family “Delaware Way” brought them carloads of cash.  That Joe Biden occupied the very highest offices in Washington, despite a tawdry record easily accessible to the public, says much about the state of this nation.   Given the Biden record, it’s no surprise that he granted last minute pardons to family and friends as he walked out of the White House.                                                                                 # # #                                          

Much of the 19th century’s optimism, rooted in the triumphs of technology, evaporated in the embers of World War I.  So when a German mathematics teacher, Oswald Spengler, published The Decline of the West in 1918 he found many readers shared his pessimism.  Shortly thereafter Georges Bernanos, a war veteran, said:  “Christianity is dead.  Europe is going to die.  What could be simpler?”  Nevertheless, when I began teaching history 60 years ago most universities’ general education requirements still included two semesters of Western Civilization.  Little did I imagine that in 20 years Jesse Jackson would lead Stanford University students in a march chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go!”   He and his followers were, in fact, merely fulfilling Fulton J. Sheen’s prophetic words in 1974:  “we are at the end of Christendom,” meaning “the economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles.”  Still more, he declared:  “we have seen it die.”  Some certainly think so.

Dambia Moyo, an Oxford-educated Nigerian economist, explained why she thought it died in How the West Was Lost:  Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead (New York:  Farrar, Straus, and  Giroux, c. 2011; Kindle Edition).  Years ago I read and reviewed Moyo’s Dead Aid—a persuasive critique of various programs designed to help Africans that actually did much harm—and I think her analysis of the West’s decline worth pondering.  Economists rarely write fluently, and Moyo’s text takes patience to work through.  But her main points are clearly made and should give us pause.  However glibly economists following John Maynard Keynes have declared we can endlessly borrow money because we are borrowing from ourselves, there is always a payday someday.  How long we can put off the coming collapse no one knows.  But the West cannot survive the economic policies it’s pursued for a century.  And the author believed China would soon become the world’s economic superpower.  She says the West (and especially the United States) lost its way because of how it “viewed, stored and wasted its capital.  The West’s behaviour over the last fifty years has been like that of a profligate son, squandering the family wealth garnered over the centuries—frittering it away on heady indulgences and bad investments” (p. 14).  In short, we lived far beyond our means, borrowing to spend, going into debt rather than paying our bills.  

This became painfully evident when the housing market collapsed in 2008, exposing economic folly at its worst.  In the 1930s FDR’s New Deal sought to help folks own homes, and “policymakers inadvertently launched a fifty-year culture of debt and spawned a generation that set their economies firmly down a path of economic destruction” (p. 36).  Emboldened by government guarantees, banks unwisely loaned money and debtors generally evaded the consequences of their spendthrift ways.  “The 2008 housing crisis is the West’s worst bubble since the Great Depression, not simply in its impact on the financial sector but because of its reach into the real economy – people’s jobs, companies and the governments themselves.  The true scale of the fallout is yet to be felt. What the world is less willing to acknowledge is how the US government has presided over and continues to create and foment the worst kind of bubble: a bubble in an unproductive asset financed by bank debt (the housing bubble)” (p. 60).  What the bubble revealed was  “Debt, as a way of Western life, has become an addiction” (p. 49).  Consider, for example, President Joe Biden’s solution to the student loan quagmire—just “forgive” the debts and keep on loaning more students more money! 

Millions of older folks depend on the government for their retirement income.  We in the U.S. expect Social Security to care for us in old age.  However, Moyo says:  “Forget Bernie Madoff, forget Allen Stanford, the biggest Ponzi scheme has got to be the looming car crash that is Western pension funds.   And like any well-run Ponzi game, its results will be devastating.  It will all end in tears.”  Sadly:  “Governments across the Western industrialized world have, through pension funds, successfully sold their citizens something that they can never possibly finance.” (p. 79).  The truth regarding these funds remains unknown because of “deliberate obfuscation” involving “accounting trickery” concealing the actual debt we owe.  

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Many of us who taught courses in Western Civilization sought to transmit the rich cultural and intellectual history of the West to our students.  Rooted in the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Medieval worlds, the West nurtured the liberal arts and their cultural traditions.  We generally took the stance of Cicero in regarding history as historia magistra vitae, a discipline providing life-lessons worthy of study and implementation.  That rich treasure trove is now threatened by revolutionary movements seeking to erase history in order to establish progressive ideologies.  Thus in the progressive schools following John Dewey history was replaced by “social studies” and classical languages disappeared.  Alarmed by such developments, Frank Furedi, a British scholar, has written The War Against the Past:  Why the West Must Fight for Its History (Cambridge:  Polity Press, c. 2024; Kindle Edition).  Prompted by riots in Portland, Oregon, in 2024, he argues “that the stakes in this conflict could not be higher.  For when the past is contaminated, it becomes near impossible to endow people’s life with meaning in the present.  The aim of this book is to explain why the War Against the Past must be defeated” (p. 6).

In George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, Winston Smith (the book’s protagonist) anticipated this war:  “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”  Instead of trying to tell what happened in the past with reasonable fairness, we now have professors and journalists who specialize in “accusatory history” or “grievance archaeology.”  Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—widely used as a text in the nation’s schools—-perfectly illustrates this endeavor. The point is not to tell the truth and develop students’ minds but to mobilize mobs to trash anything slightly racist or colonialist.  Thus removing statues of Robert E. Lee was likened to getting rid of a rabid dog that needs to be slain.  A loathing for one’s ancestors, a guilty conscience for planetary pains, is cultivated.  Many elementary schools now lament the injustices resulting from “white privilege” and seek to shame kids for their skin color.  The late great Margaret Thatcher saw this development quite clearly, saying:  “‘We are witnessing a deliberate attack on those who wish to promote merit and excellence, a deliberate attack on our heritage and our past, and there are those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved doom, oppression and failure—as days of hopelessness, not days of hope’” (p. 16).  

To show how and why this contempt for the past developed, Furedi explores its “long gestation.”  The progressive movement, arising in the closing decades of the 19th century, generally tried to untether itself from the past in order to birth a fresh new and much improved world.  American progressives wanted to change things and were sure they could improve most everything they touched, be it politics or religion or education.  John Dewey embraced Darwin’s theory of naturalistic evolution and urged discarding “the whole past two thousand years of philosophical discourse, with its search for a permanent and unchanging reality.”  So too “New Liberals” in Britain, “Social Democrats” in Sweden, and thousands of socialists and communists and fascists all shared the same commitment to utopian schemes.  Doing so led them to write “negative histories” condemning tradition and heroic figures in a past, which “is haunted by evil; its influence is malevolent, and the sway it exercises over present-day society is implicated in oppressive and exploitative behaviour” (p. 96).   Furedi deems this a “Year Zero ideology” determined to clean the slate and write an entirely different story for mankind.  This was early evident during the French Revolution, with its revolutionary calendar and more recently Pol Pot declaring year zero as he began cleansing Cambodia in 1975.  “Advocates of Year Zero frequently practice what the Romans characterized as damnatio memoriae:  the erasure of history” (p. 99).

Leading the charge to re-write history are writers obsessed with racism.  Ancient Greeks are denounced as evil because they owned slaves.  Never mind that slavery in the ancient world had nothing to do with skin color!  Since Aristotle thought slavery resulted from natural inequalities separating men, he is condemned for his “‘heinous views’ as if he was a 21st-century Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” (p. 107).  He’s further condemned because “he is regarded as one of the founding figures of Western civilization through the ages. Taking him down by contaminating his reputation is not unlike the ‘condemnation of memory’ by Roman practitioners of damnatio memoriae” (p. 108).  They make slavery the major factor in American history, as is evident in The New York Times 1619 Project that has been adopted by many schools.  To Furedi this project “is designed to contaminate the tradition and foundation that underpins the American way of life” (p. 109). The chief scribe for the 1619 Project, Hannah Jones, believes that:  “’The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.’  Her reference is not simply to the white people who settled America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She added that the ‘descendants of these savage [white] people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community.’   An unceasing record of wickedness connects the white settlers who arrived on the shores of America in 1619 with their descendants today’” (p. 110).  Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her fulminations, and folks like her see most all history as a story of exploitation and oppression of indigenous and enslaved peoples. 

At the heart of this endeavor is “anachronism,” defined as an “error in chronology; the placing of something in a period of time to which it does not belong.”  It is what the French historian Lucien Febvre  termed the historian’s “sin of sins.”  Yet hundreds of modern historians sin with abandon!  Militant feminists scout out incidents of sexual discrimination and equate Roman matrons with American housewives.  Scholars finding their own “identity” in race or ethnic roots discover the evils of racism wherever they look.  Icons of the West’s literary masterpieces are dismissed if they even slightly differ from today’s cultural standards.  “Shakespeare’s plays have also become the target of the anachronistic temper that aims to reinterpret and rewrite his text in accordance with the ethos of decolonization” (p. 147).  A UCLA Shakespeare scholar who wrote White People in Shakespeare claims “that ‘Shakespeare’s poems and plays actively engage in “white-people-making.”’  Indeed:  “‘Shakespeare provided the cultural resources white people have drawn on over the centuries to ‘define and bolster their white cultural, racial identity, solidarity, and authority’” (p. 149).  Anachronism slips easily into “presentism”—what C.S. Lewis deemed “chronological snobbery”—when we forget “the principle of historical specificity” in order to become Monday morning quarterbacks.  Lyn Hunt, a former President of the American Historical Association, labeled it a stance of  “temporal superiority.’”  Said she:  “‘Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation.  Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior’” and rather than “learning from history” and we look for “lessons” rather than enlightenment.  “‘Presentism encourages a narcissistic mode of consciousness that flatters its practitioners for being enlightened and ‘aware’, unlike those who inhabited the ‘bad old days’” (p. 158).  The past becomes a white board upon which we can splash our current concerns.  

After carefully examining a variety of important topics—language, racial identities, education, etc.—Furedi concludes:  ‘The harm done by the vandalization of the past is all too evident in the contemporary world.  Young people, growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them, are the human casualties of the War Against the Past.  The imposition of the condition of historical amnesia contributes to the perpetuation of a mood of cultural malaise.  Trapped in a presentist quagmire, Western society, which once prided itself in its orientation towards the future, has turned on itself.  Winston Churchill was right when he stated that ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.  To recognize this is also to recognize the existence of an additional virtue, the importance of which is most obvious when it is least present: the virtue of having a clear sense of the traditions to which one belongs.” (p. 333).

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A more optimistic take on the state of the West is provided by Spencer Klavan in How to Save the West:  Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Publishing, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  He acknowledges that there are many signs of “civilizational collapse” but reminds us that there have been many such eras throughout the history of the West.  But Christians should never lapse into despair, either with themselves or their civilization.  Powerful cultural forces may push us to despise the past, but we need a healthy historical perspective to give us “knowledge that might help put our present crises into context.”  The crises he examines include reality (choosing objectivity or relativism), the body (accepting it as given or trying to remake it), meaning (what makes life worth living), religion (is there actually a transcendent realm), and the regime (who ought govern the nation).  “To jettison the best thought of ages past is to leave ourselves fumbling through an eternal present.”  So we need to overcome our “chronological chauvinism” and give “sustained attention to the great works of Western culture” that will enable us to deal with the crises we confront (p. xvii).  Are thinks the “people who will preserve Western civilization, no matter how perilous its future, will be people like you, the reader of this book” (p. XXVIII). 

A decade ago media folks began tossing about the phrase “post-truth.”  This indicated a relativistic approach to reality.  You have “your truth” and I have mine, but there’s no actual truth.  Words don’t describe reality.  They’re used to impose our will upon our world.  Common sense realists have always assumed we can know things that are separate from us.  Relativists, following the prescriptions of Nietzsche, recite mantras such as:  “Believe women.” “That’s my truth.” “Elevate black voices.”  One’s personal feelings are preeminent and demand acceptance.  Martin Heidegger dubbed this “the unconditional dominion of subjectivity.”  This position is as ancient as the Sophists in Athens (such as Protagoras) who taught students how to speak persuasively, manipulating crowds by any means possible.  Plato would report that another Sophist, Thrasymachus, said: “justice is nothing other than what is good for the powerful.”  

T. S. Eliot memorably said that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” As was evident in his famous “allegory of the cave,” Plato shared this conviction.  His teacher, Socrates, dedicated himself to refuting the Sophists and arguing for objective of truths, knowing what is real.  As portrayed by by Plato, Socrates’ dialogues “inaugurated Western philosophy. We must make it our question too” (p. 17).  “At its root, the question is whether there is anything outside yourself” (p. 27).  Relativism, confining truth to one’s mind, was (to Socrates and Plato) manifestly shallow and untenable.  It leads to nihilism and fantasies.  “The nihilism that fueled the Gulag” and the fantasies that fuel utopias, Klavan says, have “engulfed civilizations before, and may do so again.”  But “there is a curious thing about the West.  The truth that fails in the short term often turns out to be the one that lives for all time.  We revere the name of Socrates, and not his executioners; we celebrate Solzhenitsyn and not Stalin.  “‘Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains but a single grain, with no life.”’  So said Jesus to his followers not long before he was crucified.”  An understanding of history should show us that “eternal truths seem, inevitably, to reassert themselves.  It is our duty to defend these eternal truths—no matter how often they are denied, no matter how unpopular they become, and, as with Socrates, no matter the cost” (p. 34).

Common sense realists acknowledge that we are “rational animals,” creatures uniquely endowed with both physical and spiritual faculties.  Today’s sophists generally deny our spiritual side, our soul.  Analyzing it, Aristotle dealt with our uniquely human self-consciousness.  We not only think but we know we are thinking.  Saint Jerome “called this self-aware part of us the scintilla conscientiae—the divine spark of self-knowledge” (p. 40).  We have a given nature.  We are embodied souls.  Aristotle deemed this reality “hylemorphism—the belief that form (morphē) and matter (hulē) are always (or almost always) intertwined.”  This suggests a “union between body and soul that saves us from both pure materialism and pure dualism, a philosophy that conforms to our experience while also providing insight into how to live” (p. 60).  Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle’s insights and wove them into Christian philosophy.  Facing the sexual confusion amply evident in America, where men pretend to be women and win athletic competition, a return to Aristotle would be a move in the right direction.  

In the purely material world examined by scientists such as Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, there’s nothing meaningful to our existence.  We’re tiny bits of matter fitting into a niche illustrating the processes of natural selection.  Indeed, says Klavan:  “If there truly is nothing beyond nature, both art and life are meaningless” (p. 87).  But there’s the “music of the spheres” and we make music!  To Igor Stravinsky: “music is a force which gives reason to things” and “probably attended the creation of the universe.” 

To find meaning we need to turn to thinkers in the past who actually found it.  They refused to believe that matter is all that is and allowed insights from poetry and philosophy to guide them in dealing with matters of ultimate concern.   They celebrated artists endeavoring to portray athletes and poets celebrating soldiers.  One of the best of the ancients, Plato, wrote the Timeas, a dialogue still worth heeding.  In it, “time and space are a copy, a mimēsis, of the infinite timelessness in which the one creator god dwells: ‘time imitates the infinite,’” and “the whole of space was formed in such a way ‘as to be as much like the perfect, rational, living being as possible, in an imitation (mimēsis) of that being’s eternal nature.’  The interlocking revolutions of the heavenly bodies mimic the harmony and order of the craftsman-god himself, moving according to predictable patterns and emulating, in time and space, the eternal rationality of god—who made all things “with the desire that everything should be as similar to him as possible.’” This goes for us, as well, for we are a “microcosm, a miniature model of the vast, mimetic world.  When we reason well—when the image of the world in our mind aligns with the truth of the world as it is—we are ‘imitating the unchanging revolutions of God’ within our own souls” (p. 84).  

Such insights from ancient thinkers naturally lead us to our need for religion.  That many modern folks have no interest in religion doesn’t mean they have no need for it.  We need permanent values as well as passing facts.  In fact, some astute scientists are “beginning to consider God a perfectly plausible answer to the ultimate questions that precede scientific inquiry” (p. 114).  Strangely enough, some high-level scientific speculations sound downright theological!  Why does anything exist”  Why?  From Whence?   There is no obvious material reason for the strange “fine tuning” found throughout the universe.  It really does seem there is Mind as well as matter.  It’s really true “that in the beginning, was the word” and creation came into being.  “So it is that Saint Augustine said to God, ‘you do not create in any other way than by speaking.’  I am suggesting that life is a language, from the heavens which declare the glory of God to the strands of DNA which synthesize living creatures into being from primordial sludge” (p. 134).  In Augustine and the Bible there is food for the soul that transcends “the pop Epicureanism that some materialists and scientists have settled upon” (p. 135).

Concluding his treatise, Klavan says:  If there is one thing I hope you will take away from all these reflections on the current state of the West, it is this: hold on to what is truly real” (p. 175).  Hold tightly to your faith in God.  Be a good mom or dad, support your church.  Tend your soul with care.  Ponder permanent things.  Doing so will help revive Western Civilization.