My kind of conservatism

Like many of my conservative friends who once felt comfortable in the GOP, I've felt homeless and alienated for the last decade. I endure the Trump era and hope for a restoration of what is known as "fusionism" in American conservatism. I'm not particularly optimistic (that may be a conservative trait). From "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism":

The last decade was unkind to pro-freedom conservatives. Those of us who still find merit in the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, limited government, moral traditionalism, and global leadership increasingly look like anachronisms. In the age of MAGA, a variety of insurgent factions—including new right populists, postliberals, national conservatives, and antisemitic groypers—compete for influence in a right united less by shared principles than by a common hostility to both the left and the conservative mainstream of the late 20^th century.

This is not the first time the American right has been little more than a loose collection of competing dogmas. In the years following World War II, the American right encompassed a jumble of ideological impulses. One faction included traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, who themselves disagreed on fundamental questions. Pro-market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek exerted enormous influence, despite insisting they were not conservatives at all. Ayn Rand’s anti-religion Objectivists, the remnants of the Southern Agrarians, and conspiracy-minded cranks like Robert Welch likewise all occupied space within the broader right-wing ecosystem.

The eventual consolidation of several of these factions into a recognizable conservative movement was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required intellectual leadership, institutional development, and a willingness to draw lines. Figures like William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review were indispensable in this endeavor. Conservatives sought to build a tent large enough to contain a winning coalition, but not so large that it welcomed figures and beliefs antithetical to the movement itself.

The postwar conservative intellectual movement never lacked disagreement, but it eventually established a framework capable of containing and promoting its best elements. The political approach that was eventually named fusionism played an important role in maintaining an uneasy but influential coalition. Fusionism’s leading proponents also provided a principled argument against one of the right’s most persistent temptations: populism. Their arguments have largely been forgotten. They are worth recovering.

Fusionism, most associated with National Review editor Frank Meyer, emerged as the most successful effort to give the postwar right-wing movement coherence. .... (more)

National Review and The Dispatch remain home to many fusionist conservative writers.

George Hawley, "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism," The Dispatch, April 24, 2026.

Positive thinking

This reminded me of the argument that optimists are often disappointed while pessimists are often happily surprised. From "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy":

In the years since Sigmund Freud discovered the couch, Americans got the strange idea that happiness is the natural human condition. Unhappiness, they decided, is a psychological problem. “Unhappiness is both a political state and a mental health crisis,” wrote Tara D. Sonenshine in The Hill in 2024. In a Guardian piece last month, therapists described patients who became “depressed” by political stress.

Despite the narrative that it’s a disease to be treated, unhappiness is totally normal.

Humans aren’t designed to be happy all the time. ....

In recent decades, there’s been an obsession with improving “mental health.” But the concept of “mental health” has so many vague definitions that anyone the least bit unhappy is presumably “mentally unwell.” Therapy culture has taught us to attend closely to our emotions because anything negative supposedly might be the early sign of something serious and merit professional intervention. ....

A purely positive attitude, meanwhile, isn’t always a cognitive asset. Research on goal achievement finds that total optimists who fantasize about success often underperform those who realistically imagine obstacles. College graduates who fantasized about getting a job, for example, got fewer offers and earned less two years later than graduates who were filled with more doubt and worry. .... (more)

Carolyn D. Gorman, "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy," The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2026.

On this day in 1775

"The sword glitters"

I only possess a few of Chesterton's thirty-some books: Heretics and Orthodoxy, of course, his Autobiography, and The Man Who was Thursday. I also have a couple of collections of quotations. He was eminently quotable. He was admired by C.S. Lewis, and that was what first brought me to him. In a very good essay, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Rachel Lu on his great strength and some of his weaknesses:

The only possible excuse for this book,” wrote G.K. Chesterton at the outset of his 1908 book Orthodoxy, “is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.”

This is vintage Chesterton: witty, memorable, charmingly self-deprecating. Just two lines into the book, he already has readers fully engaged, hungry for further explanation. It’s a great lead-in to Orthodoxy, but also to Chesterton’s work more broadly.

Building on his intriguing start, Chesterton relates how the reviewers of his previous 1905 work, Heretics, had complained that it was unreasonable for him to engage in armchair criticism of their philosophies when he had yet to explain his own. “It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make,” he notes, “to a person only too ready to write books on the feeblest provocation.” But though Orthodoxy is pitched as an answer to this challenge, Chesterton offers an important qualification. “I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it,” he explains. “God and humanity made it; and it made me.”

With a vast corpus and a wide range of interlocutors, Chesterton did a lot of shooting in his lifetime, hitting some targets and missing others by wide margins. He was winsome, whimsical, profound but also preposterous, maddeningly unsystematic, and often in error. Somehow even his bad shots feel dignified. And he himself reveals the reason here in the first lines of Orthodoxy. Chesterton understood his entire public career as a kind of answer to a challenge: the challenge of reductive, rationalist, soul-destroying pathologies of modernity. ....

...[H]e provides a wonderful conceptual framework to explain how tradition can help us cope with reality’s paralyzing complexity. If the world is large and chaotic, what is needed is an anchor, or perhaps a root, to attach human society to something firmer and more permanent than the whims and fantasies of a given moment. Tradition can be that root. A firm grounding in the wisdom of the past can enable the living to hold seemingly-conflicting truths in a dynamic tension, drawing stability and nourishment from the root in order to engage the world with confidence. More than just explaining this theory, Chesterton lived it, delineating a space much like what the humanist Lee Oser calls “the radical middle,” in which the strong root of Christian tradition and orthodoxy enables believers to hold a “center of sanity” that looks radical to observers from many different angles mainly because it reveals a reality that is in fact wonderfully strange. .... (more)

Rachel Lu, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Law & Liberty, April 1, 2026.

“Either Jesus never was or he still is"

From "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief":

Muggeridge was one of the top journalists of his time. A British newspaperman who became an influential television broadcaster, he was a natural skeptic. This trait served him well in the Soviet Union, where the Manchester Guardian sent him in the fall of 1932. Like many young socialists, the 29-year-old Muggeridge was drawn to the supposed warmth of collectivism. In the cold of winter, however, he heard rumors of deprivation. During Lent in 1933, he defied a travel ban on journalists, sneaked aboard a train and searched for the truth in Ukraine.

As Easter loomed, Muggeridge observed the horror of the Holodomor, a famine imposed by Stalin through state-run farming and the seizure of harvests. He witnessed starving peasants, empty villages and “hard-faced” soldiers. Years later, in his autobiography, he called it “a nightmare memory.”

Then came the wonder. On a Sunday morning in Kyiv, acting on an impulse, Muggeridge entered a church. “It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar,” he wrote. The devotion of the people amazed him. “Never before or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of turning to God in great affliction was overpowering . . . I felt closer to God then than I ever had before, or am likely to again.” ....

His moment of conversion came in 1967, while filming a BBC program on the Holy Land. It happened in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

As at the church in Kyiv, the faith of others stirred him. “Seeing a party of Christian pilgrims at one of these shrines, their faces bright with faith, their voices as they sang so evidently and joyously aware of their Saviour’s nearness, I understood that for them the shrine was authentic,” he wrote. “I, too, became aware that there really had been a man, Jesus, who was also God.” His faith was still a work in progress. It “remained rather abstract, a useful counterpoint to his attacks on secular liberalism,” wrote his definitive biographer Gregory Wolfe. ....

In his last years, Muggeridge wrote about his deepening faith, culminating in the 1975 publication of Jesus: The Man Who Lives. The frontispiece of the original edition is a photo from a Spanish abbey of what may be a touchstone image for Muggeridge: doubting Thomas touching the wound of Christ in a stone bas-relief.

The Resurrection “seems to me indubitably true,” wrote Muggeridge at the book’s end. “Either Jesus never was or he still is. As a typical product of these confused times, with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition, diffidently and unworthily, but with the utmost sincerity, I assert that he still is.” .... (more)

John J. Miller, "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief," The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2026.

Miserable offenders

Alan Jacobs:

In our church, during Lent we use the old language from the Book of Common Prayer, in which we confess ourselves to be “miserable offenders.” Many people, I have learned over the years, dislike that language because it sounds self-degrading or self-abnegating. But the word “miserable,” which comes from the Latin miserere, simply means “in need of mercy.” And an “offender” is just a person who has sometimes done what is wrong. Aren’t we all people who have done things wrong and are, therefore, in need of God’s mercy? ....

...[M]y comfort as a reliably bad Christian, an inconsistent and often hapless follower of Christ, is that nothing I do, no matter how bad, surprises or discourages God. As J.I. Packer wrote in his classic Knowing God:

There is unspeakable comfort — the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates — in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.

So, in the light of that Good News, let’s welcome the Christmas and Easter Christians with open arms. To those of you who are Christmas and Easter Christians: Come without guilt, without shame, and without hesitation. We are all people who have gone astray; we are all in need of God’s mercy. Christmas and Easter tell us that we’ve got it. In Christ God has dealt definitively with our offenses, and if that’s not something to celebrate, I don’t know what is. So here’s something each of us can say to our neighbors in the church: Greetings, fellow miserable offender!

Alan Jacobs, "Welcome to the Party, Christmas and Easter Christians," The Dispatch, April 5, 2026.

He is risen!

An Easter prayer:

Brightness of God's glory and exact image of God's person, whom death could not conquer nor the tomb imprison, as you have shared our frailty in human flesh, help us to share your immortality in the Spirit. Let no shadow of the grave terrify us and no fear of darkness turn our hearts from you. Reveal yourself to us this day and all our days, as the first and the last, the living one, our immortal Savior and Lord. Amen.

The day in between

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger

Russell Moore:

Good Friday is terrible, but it is also dramatic and full of passion. Easter Sunday is triumphant, radiant, and full of song. But Holy Saturday is quieter and thus harder for us to inhabit. It asks us to remain near the tomb and to resist the urge to hurry toward resurrection before we have reckoned with the weight of Christ’s death and burial.

The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Jesus “was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead,” while the Nicene Creed declares that the eternal Son “became man” and, for our sake, “suffered death and was buried.” We should not mistake these as spare liturgical phrases placed between cross and resurrection merely to mark the passage of time between Friday and Sunday. They are the church’s way of insisting that the gospel is anchored in history, with a real flesh and blood body in a real tomb.

Disruption

I taught in public high schools for almost forty years. I didn't have serious discipline problems in the classroom. When I introduced myself to a new class of 9^th grade US History students, I would tell them something like, "You've been in school for eight or nine years. You know the behavior teachers expect. If you misbehave, I'll assume you're doing it on purpose." I had very few behavior issues. I retired twenty years ago. I wonder whether that would work today. From "How Public Disorder Starts":

[Schools] are the institutions where we teach the next generation how shared spaces work.

Schools confront the dilemma of inclusion every day to a degree outsiders may not fully appreciate. They are less visible than churches and other spaces; you cannot wander into a school uninvited. Yet inside those walls, maintaining order has become increasingly difficult. Inappropriate student behavior has long been a chronic challenge in American schools, but many teachers report the problem has grown more acute in the years since the pandemic disrupted schooling and children’s social development. The RAND American Teacher Survey, for example, finds that teachers report increased classroom disruption and student misbehavior, with managing student behavior ranking among their top sources of job-related stress.

Disorder doesn’t arrive in schools as a single incident. It spreads gradually, and behaviors once considered unacceptable become tolerated, then normalized. Eventually, the culture of the school bends around accommodating disruption. When that happens, learning becomes secondary to managing chaos. Reflecting on my own experience teaching in a low-performing South Bronx elementary school in my book, How the Other Half Learns, I wrote:

A single disruptive child can bring a classroom to a halt. Put three or four such children in a single room and even minor misbehaviors can have a cascading effect, bleeding away a teacher’s time and attention and student learning. When multiple children with serious behavior problems share a classroom, a level of disorder can ensue that tests the patience and skill of all but the most gifted teachers. When those behaviors become common across classes and grades, an entire school soon groans under its weight.

This is not a mere philosophical concern. Surveys consistently rank student behavior issues among the leading reasons teachers leave the profession. Predictable consequences ensue: Teacher turnover destabilizes schools, instructional continuity disappears, and new teachers arrive unprepared for the conditions they encounter, with many leaving as quickly as they came. Over time, the institution itself begins to falter and fail to serve its primary purpose: educating children. Faced with these pressures, many schools have responded not by reasserting norms of order and academic purpose but by subtly redefining their mission. ....

Again from How the Other Half Learns:

When a school or teacher fails to engage or manage disruptive behavior, children are cheated. But who, exactly? The disruptive child who is suspended and excluded from class? Or the diligent student whose education bleeds away hour after hour, while her teacher responds to antisocial outbursts, or focuses on her classmate to prevent them? The weight of education policy and practice, as enshrined in impulse, empathy, and the law, comes down on the side of the disruptive child.

Schools occupy a unique place in this debate because they do more than simply reflect social norms—they help create them. Public transit works only when riders respect basic rules of conduct. Courts function only when citizens accept procedures and verdicts. Workplaces operate only when adults can tolerate standards and correction. Where do those habits come from? School. .... (more)

Robert Pondiscio, "How Public Disorder Starts," The Dispatch, March 26, 2026.

"Losing ourselves altogether"

From "The Philosophers and Churchmen Who Fell for Fascism." This is a lesson for any believer who comes to prioritize political commitment above first things:

“Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique,” [Charles] Péguy wrote. By “mystique” he meant the transcendent commitment to a certain ideal. One enters into public life inspired by notions of justice, liberty, fairness, and right, but in the actual action of politics, one faces repeated temptations to compromise, to put victory above truth and virtue. The great danger is that this process can be imperceptible to the person undergoing it. “An action begun as a mystique continues in politics, and we do not notice that we are crossing the dividing line. Politics devour the mystique and we fail to jump out.” Without knowing it, we make little choices to compromise on telling the truth, or to use underhanded means to achieve our ends, or to slander our opponents. As time goes on, the compromises get deeper and deeper, and we risk losing ourselves altogether.

It is possible, however, to jump off this terrible train at any point. Maritain did it. Péguy wrote that a person with his or her heart in the right place can discern, finally, where the dividing point is that separates support for one’s ideals and the embrace of the brute political power struggle. If a person chooses to jump out, he will be called a traitor by his political compatriots. But for those who stay on board the train of moral compromise, Péguy had harsh words: “The real traitor, in the full sense of the word, in the strong sense of the word, is the man who sells his faith, who sells his soul and gives himself up, loses his soul, betrays his principles, his ideal, his very being, who betrays his mystique and enters into its corresponding politique.”

Nathan Beacom, "The Philosophers and Churchmen Who Fell for Fascism," The Dispatch, March 23, 2026.

"Why do you hide your face from me?"

From "The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It"

In the psalms, lament is a structured form of prayer that follows a discernible pattern: crying out to God, complaining, requesting, remembering God’s works, and—perhaps most surprisingly—often ending in praise of God. And for much of contemporary American Christianity, which we know best and have been studying for years, it has quietly disappeared. ....

...[O]nly about 4 percent of contemporary Protestant Christian worship songs reflect the kind of lament modeled in the psalms, despite the fact that nearly 40 percent of the biblical Psalter consists of laments. The hymnal of Israel was saturated with honest complaint. Ours largely is not. At some point—and this has been well-documented by theologians like Soong-Chan Rah, Todd Billings, and Walter Brueggemann—much of American Christianity internalized a triumphalist posture toward suffering: one that emphasized victory, gratitude, and praise, and grew increasingly uncomfortable with the raw petition and protest that fill the psalms. ...

When churches ask suffering people to outwardly project trust rather than speak truth, they are asking a particular kind of thing from a particular kind of person: the person for whom Sunday morning is often the loneliest hour of the week. The cancer patient. The grieving parent. The one whose life has come apart. Even if unintentionally, they are often the ones being asked to manage their presentation, to signal resilience, to express gratitude before they have had space to grieve. When we silence the pain of our most vulnerable members, we are telling them that their full reality does not belong in the community of faith. ....

The psalmists knew the value of inconvenient honesty. The two fundamental questions of lament, as musician and author Michael Card has written, are “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love me, then why?” Jesus prayed a lament psalm (Psalm 22) from the cross, crying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are not questions the psalms treat as spiritually dangerous. They are questions that Scripture itself models—and models prolifically. Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is one of its most ancient expressions. To deprive suffering people of this practice is to withhold from them a resource that Scripture provides precisely for moments like theirs. ....

There is a difference between complaining to God and complaining about God. The psalms of lament do the former. They bring honest anguish, protest, even anger—directly into the presence of God. This is not the same as griping about God to others. The counterintuitive truth is that complaining to God can be an act of faith: It demonstrates that you still believe God is present, that God hears, that the relationship can bear the weight of honest expression.

This is what lament does. It does not offer an explanation for suffering. It does not promise that circumstances will change. It offers something more basic: a structure for telling the truth about pain in the presence of a God who, the psalms insist, does not despise or ignore the cry of the afflicted. .... (more)

"The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It," The Dispatch, March 22, 2026.

An Evangelical?

I usually describe my theological position as "orthodox" rather than evangelical partly because of the political associations the latter now has. Evangelical was a category of Christian theology, not a political label. Orthodox (lower case "o") to me means being able to honestly and sincerely say the Apostles Creed without crossing my fingers, but, if the description below is the understanding of evangelical, I am one. From "The Real Difference Between Evangelicals and Liberal Protestants":

Some historians have wrongly suggested that evangelicals should be defined by their political or cultural orientation. Other historians (myself included) have used the Bebbington quadrilateral to define evangelicals. As David Bebbington has argued for the past 35 years, evangelicals are Protestant Christians who believe in the supreme authority of the Bible, salvation through the atoning work of Jesus on the cross, the necessity of a born-again conversion, and a Christian life that is characterized by activism, including evangelism. Those four points have characterized evangelicals in both Britain and America for the past 300 years, Bebbington argues.

I agree with the Bebbington quadrilateral, but I think there may be a simpler way to explain evangelical belief to those who find evangelicalism puzzling.

Here’s my definition: Evangelicals are Protestant Christians who believe that the fundamental human problem is individual sin and the fundamental human need is individual justification or reconciliation with God.

So, the test of whether a Protestant Christian is an evangelical is to ask whether they agree with these two statements:

1. The primary human problem is individual sin.
2. The greatest need that each person has is to be saved from sin through faith in Christ.

If a Protestant Christian agrees with those two statements, they’re probably an evangelical. If they disagree, they may be a mainline or liberal Protestant or some other variety of Christian, but they are not likely to fit into evangelicalism, even if they might use the term “evangelical” to describe themselves. (more, including his definition of liberal Protestantism)

Daniel K. Williams, "The Real Difference Between Evangelicals and Liberal Protestants," The Dispatch, March 15, 2026.

The Facebook deputy and the Twitter sheriff

I often foolishly read comments that I know will annoy me. I almost always refrain from commenting myself. About online behavior:

Like you, I’ve been watching friends and acquaintances go after one another online with the same recycled takes on the latest predictable—or conveniently manufactured—controversy. Each current event becomes a referendum on national decline. Any headline can morph into amateur constitutional law. Takes on DEI, foreign policy, vaccines—nothing is too complex to be resolved in 280 characters, preferably accompanied by moral urgency and a link to a partisan source no one will read.

The cynic in me asks: Who appointed you? Who authorized you—doomscroller, catechized by cable news—to determine when immigration becomes immoral, how election security is assessed, which historical narratives deserve canonization, or which media outlets are to be labeled heretical? What, exactly, qualifies someone for this level of cultural adjudication?

One possible answer: Dwight K. Schrute.

Rainn Wilson’s portrayal of Dwight on The Office is brilliant precisely because Dwight is so convinced of his own authority—and so oblivious to its absence. ....

But here’s the uncomfortable possibility: what if we’re more like Dwight than we think? What if we’re not in on the joke—but are instead unwittingly the punchline?

To be clear, many issues matter deeply. Addressing them is not the problem. It may be morally necessary. The problem is something closer to the Dunning–Kruger effect: low ability overestimating itself; armored with confidence, baptized in moral language, and amplified by platforms that reward certainty and drama rather than wisdom. What we are witnessing in public is not merely division but deformation—of judgment, discourse, and the virtues required for social cohesion.

This is the rise of the Facebook deputy and the Twitter sheriff: self-nominated authorities armed with fragments of information and an audience just large enough to feel consequential. ....

It may offend modern sensibilities to say this, but it remains true: not all opinions are created equal. People share equal dignity, but public judgments are not equally credible. If everyone is an expert, no one is. We can be sincere and yet wrong. Passionate and ignorant. Some speak because they have something to say; others speak because they simply have to say something. .... (more)

The whole essay is an enjoyable (to me anyway) and instructive read.

Justin D. Detmers, "We Are All Dwight Schrute Now: The Rise of the Facebook Deputy," Mere Orthodoxy, March 9, 2026.

What about evolution?

A recent article at Mere Orthodoxy describes the results of a "Pew Religious Landscape Survey" on American beliefs about evolution. The choices offered were:

1. Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process. (“pure evolution”).
2. Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power. (“intelligent design”).
3. Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. (“creationist view”).

Breaking it down:

The article, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism" intends to be read as analysis rather than advocacy. But it does advocate tolerance among Christians of varying views:

It seems that a central argument of some young-earth creationists is this: “If you deviate from the panoply of interpretations we offer on Genesis 1-11, it is because you are succumbing to secularism and downgrading the authority of the Bible.” But, as soon as you find Christians who deviate from their interpretation, but have demonstrably not been animated by secular science nor have abandoned their high view of Scripture’s authority or the historicity of the miraculous…then the argument starts to fall apart. If young-earth creationists want to regain ground on this issue with the wider culture, it might, paradoxically, come from being more open-minded towards other Christians who disagree with them.

When Copernicus and Galileo strove to demonstrate that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, the church was able to provide sophisticated (if not convoluted) Biblical and naturalistic arguments to refute the claim. But they were wrong. And, in time, the Church realized this and adopted heliocentrism. This wasn’t a concession that science had more authority than God's Word, but an admission that they had simply interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

This realization did not diminish what God’s Word told us about the rising and setting of the sun or the foundations upon which the earth rested, but it moved us closer to seeing what the author originally intended when he used those word pictures. Similarly, if we approach Genesis 1 assuming that its primary function is to refute figures like Darwin, we will miss the meat and marrow of what the Divine Author intended for us to receive from His Word and therefore may fundamentally misunderstand His world. (more)

Marc Sims, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism," Mere Orthodoxy, March 6, 2026.

The loud and troublesome insects of the hour

This post from some time ago has recently reappeared in the "popular posts" section of this blog. I appreciate the reminder, especially in times like these.

From Farnsworth's Classical English Metaphor: Edmund Burke in 1790.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.

Gateway to history

I have commented before about historical novels I have enjoyed. I dislike those that take liberties with what is actually known about real people and events, but the good ones don't. The Telegraph presents a selection of "The 20 greatest war novels." The writer, himself an author of historical fiction, introduces his choices with reference to one of my favorite historical novelists:

As a boy, I devoured the historically accurate and side-splittingly funny Harry Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, which track the disgraceful adventures of the notorious Victorian soldier-cad as he skulks and whores his way through the major conflicts of the 19th century. They stayed with me. And so shortly before writing my first novel, Zulu Hart, set during the Anglo-Zulu conflict of 1879, I interviewed Fraser. “Do you ever manipulate historical facts to suit your plot?” I asked.

“I try not to,” he replied. “The trick with real historical figures is to be honest and stay true to their spirit.” One of the few times he broke his rule was not being “quite fair” to Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification, in Royal Flash, the second of the Flashman series. “But he was such a swine anyway,” explained Fraser, “that I figured that was all right.”

To me, a good war novel should do exactly this: remain faithful to history while taking canny artistic licence to create convincing characters. It should rattle along at a decent pace and contain universal truths, jeopardy (no outcome is inevitable), and act as a gateway for readers to explore “proper” history. ....

Most of the twenty fictions are more serious than this one, but Fraser's ability to entertain made learning history fun:

Flashman (1966) by George MacDonald Fraser

Presented as the discovery of the long-lost Flashman Papers (a literary device that even deceived some American academics at the time), this hilarious, superbly researched book chronicles the army career of the notorious bully from Thomas Hughes’s popular Victorian novel Tom Brown’s School Days. Expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness, young Harry Flashman joins the infamous Lord Cardigan’s 11th Hussars and later becomes a reluctant secret agent in Afghanistan. Somehow our cowardly anti-hero emerges from the disastrous Retreat from Kabul with his skin intact, his reputation enhanced and his eye for the ladies unimpaired.

Saul David, "The 20 greatest war novels," The Telegraph, Feb. 28, 2026.

"That'll be the day..."

Re-posted:

Philip Jenkins on why we are certain March 1 was the day the patron saint of Wales died and why "death days" were so important:

St David's, Pembrokeshire, Wales

March 1 is the feast of David, the early medieval bishop and missionary who became patron saint of Wales. We actually know strikingly little of David apart from that date, of March 1, but I’m going to suggest that represents a good deal in its own right. .... 

A death about 590 is a reasonable guess, but we could easily slip fifty years either way. Oddly though, we can be sure that he died on March 1, whether in (say) 532 or 632 AD. Through the Middle Ages, hagiography was a vast area of cultural effort, when almost any outrageous achievements could be credited to a saint. (No, David did not really make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he was ordained by the Patriarch). The one thing that we know these writers did keep faithfully was the death day — the date not the year — because that marked the hero’s ascension to glory, the promotion to heaven. In a particular church or community, those days were critical, as marking the annual celebration of the beloved local saint.

Argue as much as you like, then, about precise years, achievements, martyrdoms and areas of activity, about the number of lepers cured and tyrants opposed — but don’t quarrel with death days.

Death days.

It’s an interesting term. I know my birthday. I also know that at some future point I will die, and that that will befall on a particular date. Let me be optimistic and assume that it will be a distant event, say on July 23, 2049. Each year, then, I pass through July 23 happily unaware that I am marking my Death Day, surely as significant a milestone as my birthday, but not one I can ever know with certainty until it occurs. Nor is it something we really ever contemplate, as we all know, in our hearts, that we are immortal.

I suppose though that it is something we can learn from those medieval monks, that the Death Day is not just a key event in anyone’s life, but literally the only one we can take with absolute confidence.

THAT’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE

A prophetic novel?

In the third book of his science fiction trilogy, C.S, Lewis converted his thesis from The Abolition of Man into a novel:

In 1945, C.S. Lewis published a strange, unsettling novel called That Hideous Strength. It was marketed as fiction, but it read like prophecy. ....

That Hideous Strength isn’t really about technology. In truth, it is about the objects of our obedience. It’s about what happens when humanity stops kneeling before God and starts bowing to its own tools. Lewis understood something many clever people miss: rejecting divine truth doesn’t make people more rational. If anything, it leaves them exposed, more vulnerable, more easily led.

The novel centers on an institution called the N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. It presents itself as scientific, humane, and forward-looking. It promises efficiency. Improvement. A better future, scrubbed clean of superstition and sentiment.

Behind the glass walls and polite language, however, darker intentions take hold. The organization seeks to “recondition” humanity. To reshape desire. To erase conscience. To replace moral limits with technical control. ....

In That Hideous Strength, the villains aren’t crude tyrants. They are administrators. Experts. Committees. They speak eloquently. They promise safety. They insist they are beyond good and evil because they operate on a higher plane.

Lewis recognized this tone. It is the voice of people who believe themselves absolved by intelligence. People who think cleverness is a moral category. People who confuse capability with permission.

Lewis warned of the abolition of man, not as a sudden catastrophe, but as a slow diminishment. Not destruction by force, but erosion by pride. When basic decency is discarded, those who hold authority no longer judge human behavior; they redefine what it means to be human — reshaping instincts, limits, and desires according to their own designs. .... (more)

John Mac Ghlionn, "How C. S. Lewis’s Prophetic Warning Has Come True 80 Years Later," Religion Unplugged, Feb 25, 2026.

I read it as a kid

The most recent Five Books interview is about the "best books" about the sinking of the Titanic. One of the selections is A Night to Remember (1955). I read it a long time ago. I really disliked the relatively recent film, Titanic, partly because I knew a lot about what actually happened. I tend to get annoyed when historical events are unnecessarily fictionalized. On the book:

It’s hard to imagine anybody producing a more thrilling account of the Titanic than Walter Lord’s book from 1955. The Titanic has never really gone away, but between 1912-13 and 1955 there wasn’t a lot of sustained interest. Then Walter Lord came along and published A Night to Remember. It was a bestseller that has never gone out of print.

Lord’s book is a moment-by-moment telling of the events of the night of April 14 and the morning of April 15. What’s most skillful about it is the way that it moves around in space as it recreates these moments in time. From the outset, you get phrases like ‘meanwhile’ or ‘on the boat deck.’ He moves you around the ship, creating a sense of simultaneity, even as he’s conveying a sense of the vastness of the Titanic and all of these different experiences happening at the same time, from calm to panic. He also plays around with the pacing so that it’ll slow down to have Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, reflect on his career, or Isidor and Ida Straus reflecting on their marriage. And then the pace speeds up as the danger becomes clearer, the lifeboats are being loaded and launched, and the water is rising. It becomes a complete page turner by the time the ship is going down.

It’s also held up incredibly well in terms of accuracy. That’s in part because of the advantages he had writing this book in 1955 as opposed to later, because he could interview or correspond with 60-plus survivors. He was a meticulous researcher. He used newspapers, the British and American inquiries, the published survivors’ accounts, as well as his interviews and correspondence with survivors. He was careful about not reporting some of the more dubious stories that were told about the disaster at the time. .... (more)

Steven Biel, "The best books on The Titanic," Five Books, Feb. 22, 2026.

The last enemy

Former Senator Ben Sasse is dying of cancer. Today at Mere Orthodoxy, I found this quotation from an interview. Ben Sasse:

...[A] lot is broken in this world. The existence of death is surely not the way it's supposed to be. So Jesus weeping, what a gift. The story is amazing. The whole, the whole Lazarus story and his sister's weirdly narcissistic behavior, that's us, right? Like we're dying in the story too. We're many of the characters, but we're definitely that egotistical, self-absorbed, "Jesus, why didn't you do it the way I want you to do it?"

But to our point about short attention spans, first, let's just go back and read that story and a dozen adjacent stories. The Bible is so rich and we spend so little time reading it together. Jesus weeps there, and he knows that he's gonna raise Lazarus five minutes later. So it's an amazing story because he's acknowledging that death is terrible, and yet death doesn't win. The Christian phrase in Christian literature for years has been to call death "the last enemy."

Death is a wicked thief, it's an enemy, but it's pretty great that it's the last enemy. All the stuff that I regret for having been an inadequate husband and son and father and friend and worker, truth teller, all the stuff that I've been weak on, I'm gonna be freed from all of that. Death is the last enemy. (more)

Jake Meador, "The Bright Sadness of Ben Sasse," Mere Orthodoxy, Feb. 19, 2026.