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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”