Religion
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The Persistence of the Ideological Lie by Daniel J. Mahoney April 21, 2025
The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness,...
What ‘White Lotus’ Got Right April 21, 2025
For the past several weeks, fans of The White Lotus on Max (formerly HBO) relished sitting in judgment over the idle rich. Even as the characters took various wellness treatments at the Thailand branch of the fictional White Lotus luxury resort, most...
The Romance of C.S. Lewis April 16, 2025
S. Lewis (1898–1963) continues to engage and intrigue his multiple audiences, particularly in the realms of popular apologetics and academic literary scholarship. While professional literary scholars acknowledge Lewis for his Preface to Paradise Lost...
Can Everyone Be Religious? April 15, 2025
The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other word...
Imagining the Divine Drama this Holy Week April 15, 2025
Happy Palm Sunday! This year is special for Christians because all the Christian calendars—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—have us celebrating Easter on April 20. Thus, all will be meditating on the passion of Jesus Christ this week—his suffering,...
C. S. Lewis and Progressive Pathology April 08, 2025
“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour, / England hath need of thee, she is a fen / of stagnant waters” begins a famous sonnet by William Wordsworth about the spiritual troubles of two hundred years back. Of course, things seem just as catastr...
Repudiating Genesis April 07, 2025
When the quarantine against the unwalled capitalists literally crumbled in 1989 and the walled-in workers fled their paradise in droves, Western analysts were confounded. Wasn’t history supposed to move leftward? Some resorted to the “it wasn’t real ...
We Shall Be As gods April 04, 2025
I promised Santiago I’d stop trying to make every column I write for Wisdom of Crowds somehow about magic. But there’s no way to write about tech investor Bryan Johnson’s recent call to start a new “Don’t Die” religion — one he claims will usher in a...
Stranger Years March 07, 2025
A series of souls bow their heads as they pass before Christ, who blesses them with his right hand. Above the procession are two massive dials that show the day and the month and the positions of the sun and the moon and the signs of the zodiac dress...
The Stabilization of Religious Decline Is a Big Deal March 07, 2025
It’s hard to overstate how transformative the past decade has been in American life. One need only to do a quick survey of the political and social landscape at the dawn of 2015.A decade ago, Bruce Jenner was still Bruce. The Supreme Court still allo...
The Erotic Case for God February 14, 2025
Imagine you meet a young woman who believes that only fools fall in love. Here’s her argument: There’s simply no way to prove that falling in love is a good idea, and there’s no way to know that a particular human is more worth dedicating yourself to...
A Western About Cowboys, Indians … and Mormons February 13, 2025
Overall, American Primeval, the new Western on Netflix which takes place in the early days of Utah’s settlement, is a good show—in a directional sense. That is, it is enjoyable because it represents a step in the right direction. On the one hand it a...
The Unbearable Burden January 17, 2025
You already have an opinion on this man. You may like him, you may dislike him. You may have a long list of gripes about things he has said or things you imagine he has said: “He claimed that dragons are real! He wanted to give bride-slaves to incels...
Pasolini and the Permanent Present January 16, 2025
One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he wa...
Who Should We Emulate? January 13, 2025
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” This aphorism appears in Meditations, a collection of philosophical musings written by Marcus Aurelius, a 2nd century Roman emperor.Aurelius is considered one of the less tyrannical, ev...
Americans Need to Party More January 07, 2025
This much you already know: Many Americans are alone, friendless, isolated, undersexed, sick of online dating, glued to their couches, and transfixed by their phones, their mouths starting to close over from lack of use. Our national loneliness is an...
Wokeness Was Never a Religion January 07, 2025
At the height of “wokeness” (or “social justice” if you like), writers like Helen Lewis and John McWhorter speculated that it might be “our new religion,” supplanting Christianity at a time when society was becoming increasingly secular....
I Took Religion Out of Christmas. I Regret It. December 25, 2024
Of all the treasures that came out of the cardboard box of Christmas decorations every December of my childhood, the nativity set was the best. Joseph, Mary, the kings, the shepherds: Our tiny figures were made of clay with a white glaze that looked ...
Is Woke Losing? December 18, 2024
There is much evidence to suggest that modern democracy, and with it modern political consciousness more broadly, is inclined to endless self-radicalization. Wokeness is only the latest manifestation of what Eric Voegelin called “modernity without re...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Religion Is Here to Stay November 28, 2024
Our current moment has a strange interplay of apparently opposite attitudes to Christianity which don’t fit easily into the pre-existing categories of “religious” vs “secular”. There are contradictory ways in which Western societies are becoming both...
A New “Realist” Look at Religion November 27, 2024
Sociology professor Samuel Perry’s new book Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion isn’t the first time a Protestant intellectual has attempted to articulate a “realist” view on religion. The most prominent example be...
The Moral Muscle of the Great Rafael Nadal November 20, 2024
These days, one of the few areas of life where I share a genuine interest with the high school seniors I teach, is collegiate and professional sports.I am almost fifty years old. My students are only seventeen. I have been married for over twenty-fiv...
Two Masters October 18, 2024
I delivered my first sermon to an adult congregation at the age of nine and by the time I was fifteen, I was preaching in churches across the state.I was short for my age and had to stand up very straight to see over the podium. Before I started spea...
Escaping the Mind Machine October 17, 2024
In 1714, the German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, wrote in The Monadology, “If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could ente...
