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.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and societal panic, I reviewed ten books taking a critical look at the responses taken by this country’s politicians and public health officials.  There was never any question regarding the severity of the pandemic!  It was what the World Health Organization called “unprecedented in public health history.”  But the many draconian and irrational policies—closing schools and churches, mandating masks and social distancing, waiting for a proven vaccine while ignoring possible therapeutics—seemed, to the scholars I reviewed, misguided and harmful.  Now we are getting retrospective studies which should help us evaluate what happened and prepare for the next pandemic.  Two journalists, Joe Nocera, and Bethany McLean, have written The Big Fail:  What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind (New York:  Penguin Random House Publishers, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  The book’s title clearly indicates its message:  those entrusted with authority to protect our health failed in almost every way, and despite its well-paid medical experts the United States dealt much more poorly with the epidemic than many other nations.  

Nocera and McLean begin by citing a column in The New York Times by Bret Stephens declaring “the mask mandates did nothing.”  Stephens noted that a British think tank (the Cochrane Library) specializing in “meta-analyses” found no evidence supporting wearing masks during the Covid hysteria.  In fact, the Oxford University epidemiologist who led the study declared the lack of evidence was primarily the result of not doing trials.  Shooting from the hip rather than carefully assessing the situation, governments acted like “headless chickens.”  Though health care bureaucrats and leftist politicians have lambasted the Cochrane analysis, it became clear to Nocera and McLean that in “many ways, the mask controversy was a microcosm of the pandemic itself.  During COVID-19, a mask wasn’t just a mask; it was a symbol of one’s politics.  If you were a conservative, it was practically mandatory to scoff at masks as well as other mitigation measures like social distancing or lockdowns.  If you were a liberal, you embraced them as lifesaving measures” (p. xi).  So which side was right?  The data favor the conservatives!

To provide a context for their conclusion the authors retell the history of the pandemic that hit America in 2020 when thousands of Chinese flew into the country carrying with them the deadly virus.  In February the Center for Disease Control (the CDC) began distributing test kits designed to identify persons infected with the virus.  “For reasons that have never been explained, the CDC decided to manufacture its own test kits, instead of sending them out to a third-party manufacturer, even though the CDC lacked manufacturing expertise” (p. 15).  But these tests didn’t work well and a month later the United States still lacked any effective way to respond to Covid!  This was an early indication of what would enormously compound the suffering Americans endured in months to come as a result of inept, cautious, turf-protecting bureaucrats.  Relying on them the Trump administration, as well as the governors of the states, made equally misguided decisions.  Shutting down all non-essential activities promised to slow the spread of the disease but precipitated calamitous consequences.  The edicts “became equated with ‘following the science.’  It was anything but.  Yes, there were computer models suggesting lockdowns would be effective, but there were never any actual scientific studies supporting the strategy.  It was a giant experiment, one that would bring devastating social and economic consequences” (p. 33).

The social-distancing prescription was rooted in a decision made during the George W. Bush administration following the advice a few influential health care officials.  They used a model built by a high school student, Laura Glass, “that was “developed with the help of her father, Robert, a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque,” suggesting “that simply keeping people away from each other was as effective in preventing infection as a vaccine” (p. 37).  This proposal was endorsed by the Bush administration, though several scientists evaluating it opposed its implementation, saying:  “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.  Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements.  If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe” (p. 39).  So it happened—a “manageable epidemic” became a national catastrophe.

It was also a worldwide catastrophe, fueled by “experts” such as Neil Ferguson, a famous epidemiologist who headed the infectious disease department at Imperial College London.  He had built mathematical models designed to cope with pandemics such as the bird and swine flues in 2005 and 2009.   Those “estimates were wildly off the mark,” but Ferguson still enjoyed world-wide respect and both President Trump and Anthony Fauci apparently feared that his dire warnings regarding Covid might be right.  Given his experience Fauci surely knew “that lockdowns as a mitigation measure had no basis in science,” but he insisted on them anyway.   Citing Ferguson and Fauci, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, moved quickly to fully lock down virtually everything deemed non-essential, making it the first state to do so.  Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, however, “feared that a lengthy lockdown would level the economy” and that the people’s psyche would be harmed.  Though he was savagely criticized by many, he kept his state relatively “open” during the crisis and it fared much better than California.  

One reason requiring social distancing, lock-downs, and masks proved ineffective was they failed to tackle some of the real problems associated with COVID-19.  In particular, it became early evident that the virus mainly attacked persons with underlying health issues such as old age, diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity.  People in their 70s had 10 times the mortality as those in their 50s and 100 times as those in their 20s!  Nursing homes were particularly vulnerable and recorded extraordinary numbers of deaths.  

The elderly were quite susceptible while young folks rarely suffered.  It would have made sense to require the elderly to stay at home but younger folks should have continued working and attending school.  Yet there was no real effort to differentiate between these endangered groups. 

Compounding the purely medical problems were financial developments that left the nation prostrate.  Particularly affected were were the blue collar workers employed by “essential” businesses such as Walmart, Kroger grocery stores, and marijuana shops.  Thousands of small restaurants were forced to close and little aid actually helped them.  Congress appropriated lots of money, but as one would expect much of was misappropriated and misused.  Hundreds of investigators tried to deal with the rampant fraud, but some $80 billion probably went to folks who gamed the system.  “There were all kinds of ways to get one’s hands on the government’s pandemic funds illegally.”  Indeed, The Christian Science Monitor called it the “biggest fraud in US history” (p. 394). 

Thus the “dissidents” who questioned many of the restrictions imposed on the public appear quite clairvoyant.  Jay Bhattacharya, recently appointed to head the National Institutes of Health, had long admired D. A. Henderson, who had helped eradicate smallpox in large part by persuading the public to cooperate with public health leaders.  This Anthony Fauci failed to do. Wearing masks to restaurants but taking them off while eating or keeping kids at home when no kids were dying of Covid struck many folks as nonsensical!  “Where the public health experts had failed most of all was what Henderson had always understood:  they couldn’t control human behavior.  As a point of comparison, Bhattacharya liked to use the example of Sweden.  Sweden was controversial because it eschewed lockdowns and kept its society running. But when vaccines became available, ‘Sweden got 97 percent of adults to take the vaccine without any mandates,’ Bhattacharya said.  ‘Why?  Because people trusted the government.  And the reason they trusted the government was that officials were honest with what they knew and what they didn’t know. And they didn’t force people to do things that were outside their capacity to manage” (p. 97). 

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One of the most prominent “dissidents” questioning ways the COVID-19 pandemic was handled was Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul.  As a medical doctor he could delve into the data and from the beginning doubted the pronouncements of health care bureaucrats.  He also found the journalists covering the pandemic sadly ignorant, able only to repeat what they were told by alleged experts.  Thus the Washington Post “massively” misinformed the public, fueling the panic by misreporting the pandemic.  In Deception:  The Great Covid Cover-Up (Washington, D.C.:  Regnerry Publishing, c. 2023; Kindle Edition), Paul endeavors to show how the deadly virus originated in a Chinese laboratory that had been significantly funded by America’s Anthony Fauci.  The head of the Center for Disease Control, Robert Redfield, early suspected this.  A distinguished virologist who “was uniquely qualified to delve into the origin of COVID-19,” he insisted “the lab-leak hypothesis” should be taken seriously.  Amazingly, he was abruptly excluded from the “Fauci led meetings concerning COVID-19” (p. 5).  Fauci was determined to stamp out any hint that his “gain of function” research might have led to the world-wide pandemic!  

Fauci insisted the Covid virus came from animals, probably bats.  But thousands of animals in China have been tested and no animal host has been found.   If the virus originated in bats it would have easily infected bats in labs, but it didn’t.  Redfield suspected a lab leak because careful investigation showed that its genetic code was generally found in humans but not bats.  When he saw this, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, a famous virologist and president emeritus of CalTech, told his “wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus” (p. 64).  Though Fauci knew this (as emails now prove) he did everything possible to deny it.  Almost as soon as the pandemic began, “all of those we might label Fauci’s ‘yes-men’ were frantically worried that COVID-19 came from a lab—worried because they all knew Fauci’s NIAID had been funding the Wuhan lab for years.  COVID did not appear to be a product of nature.  COVID appeared to be manipulated by scientists” (p. 15).  

This Fauci could not abide, so he organized a “formal cover-up” to protect himself.  This included the publication of an allegedly scholarly study, “Proximal Origin” written by Fauci’s associates.  “The paper was used as justification by the mainstream media to either ignore or dismiss anyone arguing that COVID-19 might have come from the Wuhan lab.  For the next year and a half, it would appear to the world that these scientists were united and had no doubt that the virus came from nature.  Only a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit would finally reveal that all five of the authors of “Proximal Origin” had initially concluded, after reviewing the genetic sequence of COVID-19, that the virus was not consistent with natural evolution” (p. 43).  Though hidden for a time by the nation’s media, we now know the truth, thanks to an internet group DRASTIC—-Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19.  The Covid virus originated in the Wuhan lab. “The evidence for a lab leak is withering and relentless.  No animals in the wet market had COVID-19.  No stored blood had antibodies to COVID-19.  COVID-19 didn’t struggle to infect humans as previous coronaviruses had.  And the pandemic coincidentally started just steps away from the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world?  Perhaps the simplest answer is the most accurate—that the virus was indeed a leak from one of the many experimental coronavirus labs in Wuhan” (p. 66). 

Sadly:  “The level of misinformation assailing the American people in 2020 was staggering” (p. 142).  Senator Paul tried to correct this.  He sought to help the nation understand surgical masks, noting that they had proved ineffective in “randomized controlled studies around the world,” including an early Danish publication.  There was also “a large, randomized-controlled mask study of influenza from Vietnam that showed the cloth mask–wearing group had more infections than the control group wearing no masks.  As Dr. A. A. Chughtai and his coauthors concluded, ‘Rates of infection were consistently higher among those in the cloth mask group than in the medical mask and control groups.’  I would point out that the pores of a surgical mask were six hundred times larger than the virus.  But, to these young nonscientists, I was portrayed as the person who did not ‘believe the science’” (p. 120).  So too he tried to persuade people that natural immunity to the virus would quickly develop.  Neither the Trump administration nor Tony Fauci believed this, though in time it became clear that natural immunity was better than vaccines.  Dr. Paul sought to get at the truth, but his “calls for a series of hearings on the danger of gain-of-function research, my entreaties to investigate the origins of the virus, my pleas for a major investigation of a virus that killed at least six million people worldwide were met only with resistance from the Democrats in charge.  On my own, I was able to, under considerable duress, get the CIA, DOE, and FBI to give me briefings, but not one Democrat senator attended” (p. 56).  

Much of Deception results from interactions between Senator Paul and Anthony Fauci in Senate hearings.  As Fauci repeatedly testified Paul became persuaded he was lying, trying to protect himself and his friends.  “Indeed, Anthony Fauci was turning out to be more of a disaster for the country than COVID itself.” (p. 193).  He and his wife earned $750,000 a year and “his fortune doubled during the pandemic,” swelling to more than $10 million by 2021.  (Some of this wealth came from getting million dollar honoraria from giving speeches).  Consequently Senator Paul joins Robert F.. Kennedy, Jr. in thinking Fauci a devious Machiavellian who deeply damaged the United States.  Consequently, this country, totaling four percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths.  Therapeutic medicines were available that could have helped thousands of people, but these treatments were suppressed by Fauci and his Big Pharma collaborators.  

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A former head of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, wrote Uncontrolled Spread:  Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2021; Kindle Edition).  His experience with federal bureaucracies along with his medical expertise provided him a unique vantage point, though some of the text is overly-detailed and difficult for non-scientists to grasp.  It’s also clear that he thinks things would have been better if he had been in charge!  But what’s manifestly evident is this:  America was not prepared to deal with the epidemic and manifestly failed to do so.  

Gottlieb provides us a careful accounting of COVID-19’s outbreak and spread, embracing the theory that it probably originated in a Chinese bat.  Certainly the coronavirus came from China, but responding to it was hindered by the Chinese government, which was trusted much too much by the World Health Association and its American allies  The author explained why our testing mechanisms initially failed—largely as a result of the  Department of Health and Human Services’ Center for Disease Control blundering around and failing “to roll out a diagnostic test that could screen for the coronavirus, leaving the country dangerously blind to its spread” (p. 62).   Gottlieb devoted considerable sections of the book to the this issue—better tests more quickly developed and distributed would have significantly helped us deal with the coronavirus.  But the CDC refused to work work with other labs, limiting “the agency to sequencing hundreds of cases a month when it was necessary to sequence many thousands of samples to understand the patterns of spread” (p. 246).  

In addition, for nearly two months the nation’s premier health experts assumed COVID-19 was quite like the flu, when in fact it was significantly different and needed different strategies to address it.  Thus there were detailed instruction regarding sanitizing surfaces and wearing gloves when such endeavors accomplished nothing since the virus spread through the air!  “Americans wrongly shunned food deliveries, wiped down their groceries unnecessarily, and focused limited effort and resources on mitigating the wrong drivers of spread” (p. 212).  “Social distancing” was curiously arbitrary, ranging from six feet in the U.S. to three feet in many other countries.  Earlier flu epidemics had hit younger people the hardest, building a rationale for closing schools.  But early on we knew younger folks suffered very little even if infected with Covid.   School teachers, mainly young or middle aged, were at virtually no health risk, but the teachers’ unions forced the politicians to close school!  Bars and restaurants were summarily closed, though persuasive data for such moves were never presented.  Officials just had a “hunch” it would help!  Masks, Gottlieb thought, helped some—but they needed to be the high-quality N95 rather than cheaper cloth devices.   

Given what we should have learned during the epidemic, Gottlieb sets forth a number of suggestions for both health care professionals and political policy makers.  

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One of the books published soon after the pandemic struck was The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Publishing, Kindle Edition, c. 2020), written by Jay Richards (a business professor at the Catholic University of America), Douglas Axe (a biology professor at Biola University), and William Briggs (an economist who’s published over a hundred scholarly papers).  Seeking to evaluate the evidence and analyze the repercussions of the pandemic, they sought “to sift prudence from propaganda.”  And they wrote, George Gilder said, “the definitive account of the most egregious policy blunder in the history of American government.” 

The authors doubted the doomsday forecasts that predicted the coronavirus would claim 40 million lives worldwide, including 2.2 million in the U.S., if nothing were done to slow the spread.  It was as evident then as it is now that  “these models were so wrong they were like shots in the dark.  After a few months, even the press admitted as much.  But by then vast damage had been done” (p. xiv).  But the models’ proponents, rather than confessing and correcting their errors, “began to massage the data” and  rationalize their declarations.  In this they were aided by a “gullible, self-righteous, and weaponized media that spread their projections far and wide.  The press carpet-bombed the world with stories about impending shortages of hospital beds, ventilators, and emergency room capacity.  They served up apocalyptic clickbait by the hour and the ton” (p. xv). 

Rightly assessed, the authors said, the COVID-19 pandemic could have been absorbed as part of life and addressed aggressively with every medical resource.  But hysteria set in and we granted “emergency powers” to various authorities not because of “a catastrophe that had just happened, but rather a prediction about what might happen” (p. 17).  Most predictions failed and we endured a “pandemic of panic”  spurred along by semantic equivocations.  For instance, it was decided to report that anyone dying with the virus would be identified as dying from the virus!  Yet the CDC reported that in only 7 percent of the victims was the virus the sole cause of death!  An Italian study of 355 COVID-19 victims showed that they “averaged 79.5 years of age and were in poor health.  More than a third had diabetes, and just under a third had ischemic heart disease.  A quarter had atrial fibrillation.  A fifth had active cancer, and over a sixth had either dementia or a history of stroke.  Of the 355 people, only three were in good health before catching the coronavirus” (p. 57).  Inflating numbers proved popular in the media, so the numbers of positive tests were called cases and easily conflated with significant infections.  

The authors examined public health policies (i.e. lockdowns, distancing, masks) and showed how problematic and potentially harmful they were.  We had no evidence these endeavors actually helped curtail, much less vanquish, COVID-19.  Yet we have ample evidence showing they harmed great numbers of people (students and middle aged adults who were hardly at risk of dying).  And the harms were enormous! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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