"Christian Zionism"

I have several good friends who are, or at least once were, Dispensationalists in their theological framework. I'm not and, consequently, not a "Christian Zionist." But I am a Christian and a strong supporter of the American alliance with Israel. The Christian theologian who wrote "Is ‘Christian Zionism’ Really Heretical?" doesn't believe it is heresy, but also doesn't think that the question is relevant to whether Christians ought to support Israel. The issue arose because of a recent interview Tucker Carlson did with an anti-Semite during which Carlson made the assertion that support for Israel was heretical. That controversy led to, among other things, dissension within the erstwhile conservative Heritage Foundation, during which a young female staffer said, "...Gen Z has an increased unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy."

.... This undoubtedly sincere statement raises a number of worthy and important questions that are, sadly, wrapped up in an obvious and distracting fallacy. The young woman’s generation has increasing antipathy to Israel, she says, because “Christian Zionism is a modern heresy.” But what has Israel to do with a modern Christian heresy? Has the state of Israel ever embraced or promoted or associated itself with Christian Zionism, other than to accept enthusiastic support wherever it can be found, particularly when in short supply? ....

The staffer’s complaint, then, is that if some segment of people support Israel for the wrong reasons, Israel is thereby unworthy of support. This embarrassing non sequitur does not speak well of the generation for whom she claimed to speak. People support right and good things for wrong and bad reasons all the time, and the wrong and bad reasons do not transform the right and good thing suddenly into wrong and bad. Her logic is so transparently poor that less charitable readers might view this public objection to “Christian Zionism” as a red herring to distract from what actually is just antisemitism. Alas, as much as one might wish that this uncharitable reading did not have good support, it is exactly what the likes of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are doing when they rail against “Christian Zionists.” The epithet is a cloaking device for conspiratorial hatred of Jews. ....

...Christianity does maintain that national Israel’s covenant purposes and function have been put out of gear, retired, made obsolete in terms of redemptive-historical significance, but this is not what is often derided as “replacement” theology. Properly understood, it is fulfillment theology. [N.T.] Wright, again: “[T]o distinguish between a signpost and the building to which it points is not to say anything derogatory about the signpost." Much less is it to say anything derogatory about Jewish people. That anyone would abuse these doctrines in service of antisemitism is an affront to the Christian gospel, which, Christians believe, is for Jews and Gentiles alike. ....

If a Christian comes to understand and believe that the state of Israel no longer has redemptive-historical significance, the question is then disentangled from needless and distorting religious baggage and put squarely back into its proper domain. Nobody asks the religious rationale for why we should be allies with Canada. That is a matter of international relations, not biblical exegesis. What is its form of government? Do its citizens enjoy civil liberties and the rule of law? Do they share our moral values? Believe in human dignity? Is there freedom of speech, religion, press, and association? These are the relevant considerations—and the Jewish people and their state would be only too happy to be judged by them instead of the double standards to which they’ve become sadly accustomed. Like the Heritage staffer, I am a Christian, a theologian even, and I agree that Christian Zionism in the form of Dispensational theology is a terrible reason to support Israel. Unlike her and her Gen Z compatriots, I can spot a non sequitur and therefore I can also see the many good reasons to support Israel. (more)

Brian G. Mattson, "Is ‘Christian Zionism’ Really Heretical?" The Dispatch, Nov. 23, 2025.

"In memory, it’s all in black and white."

Many of us who were alive on November 22, 1963, had experiences similar to Patrick Kurps:

No public event has shaken me so lastingly as the assassination of President Kennedy. I’m not speaking sentimentally, mourning the glory that was Camelot. JFK was a mediocre president, at best, and not a good man.

I had turned eleven a month before his murder. The killing taught me that everyone was vulnerable, even the most powerful and protected man in the world. I don’t mean that in the personal sense. I haven’t spent the last sixty-two years trembling with paranoia. I’m talking about history. No one is immune to its machinations. Few things last.

The way I learned of the assassination seems significant. Ron Ornsby and I were in the same sixth-grade class and had walked to our Safety Patrol post, carrying our flags and wearing Sam Browne belts. A driver stopped to tell us the president had been shot. ....

When I walked in the back door at home, I could see the silhouette of my mother crying in front of the television. For the next three days, we were forbidden to play outside and spent most of the time watching the news from Dallas and Washington, D.C. In memory, it’s all in black and white. ....

I was a high school senior that year. I was home because that was the day of my grandmother's funeral. We learned of the assassination from a television broadcast just before leaving to go to the church. We didn't know the President was dead until after my grandmother's interment. The lady who drove us to the cemetery stayed in the car, listening to the radio. When we got home, I called the school. I learned later that there had been crying in the halls and classrooms. The band from my high school had marched in JFK's inaugural parade.

Some time later, I learned that C.S. Lewis had also died on that day.

Patrick Kurp, "'But O the Heavy Change, Now Thou Art Gone'," Anecdotal Evidence, Nov. 22, 2025.

Grace

Frederick Buechner:

AFTER CENTURIES OF handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody's much interested any more. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.

Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.

There's only one catch, Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it.

Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

From the entry for October 30 in Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, HarperCollins, 1992.

"Like a tree planted by the water-side"

From a 1971 W.H. Auden letter critical of liturgical reform:

As for the Psalms, they are poems, and to 'get' poetry, it should, of course, be read in the language in which it was written. I myself, alas, know no Hebrew. All I know is that Coverdale reads like poetry, and the modern versions don't.

Coverdale's version of the Psalms is the version used in the Book of Common Prayer.

Coverdale's Psalm 1:

1. BLESSED is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners : and hath not sat in the seat of the scornful.
2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord : and in his law will he exercise himself day and night.
3. And he shall be like a tree planted by the water-side : that will bring forth his fruit in due season.
4. His leaf also shall not wither : and look, whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.
5. As for the ungodly, it is not so with them : but they are like the chaff, which the wind scattereth away from the face of the earth.
6. Therefore the ungodly shall not be able to stand in the judgement : neither the sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
7. But the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous : and the way of the ungodly shall perish.

liturgical reform – Snakes and Ladders

Lest we forget

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, an armistice ended combat between the armed forces of the Allied Powers and Imperial Germany. The day is observed variously as Armistice Day, Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day. It is a day to honor all veterans, living or dead. When I was in elementary school, the class paused for a minute of silence at eleven o'clock.

Inklings

From "88 Years of Middle-Earth, 75 Years of Narnia":

During the hectic middle decades of the twentieth century, from the end of the Great Depression through World War II and into the 1950s, a small circle of intellectuals gathered on a weekly basis in and around Oxford University to drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed. This erudite club included writers and painters, philologists and physicians, historians and theologians, soldiers and actors. They called themselves, with typical self-effacing humor, the Inklings. ....

Just before the dawn of World War II, 88 years ago, one of the members of this group, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (better known as J.R.R. Tolkien), published a quaint little fantasy book for children entitled The Hobbit on September 21, 1937. It was followed by a trilogy of books beginning in 1954 called The Lord of the Rings....

Thirteen years later, John’s good friend Clive Staples Lewis (better known as C.S. Lewis) and fellow Inkling published an even quainter children’s book entitled The Chronicles of Naria: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe 75 years ago on October 16, 1950. It was followed by 5 sequels and 1 prequel. There is a new set of movies to be adapted for Netflix in which filming has already begun for the sixth published book, but the first in the series, The Magician’s Nephew. ....

...[B]ooks, articles, and videos have been made about the overt and subtle Christianity packed into the books Tolkien and Lewis have created. Middle-earth has been around for 88 years and Narnia for 75. ....

I don't think that The Magician's Nephew ought to be the first in the Netflix series, even though CSL himself recommended that as the proper reading order. There are also rumors that Aslan is to be voiced by Merrill Streep! Nevertheless, when the Netflix series comes, I will hope for the best.

Mark Wilson, "88 Years of Middle-Earth, 75 Years of Narnia," Catholic Bard, Nov 8, 2025.

Against domination

Joseph Loconte on one of the reasons Tolkien and Lewis remain relevant beyond just entertainment:

.... Tolkien and Lewis made a literary pact between them: They would write novels to undeceive their generation and quicken the moral imagination. ....

The result, The Screwtape Letters (1942), exposed how fear, hatred, and ambition could be manipulated to serve the lust for power. The devil and his minions want people “hag-ridden” by the future, Lewis writes, “haunted by visions of imminent heaven or hell on earth.” Once individuals become obsessed with controlling the future, they will be “ready to break the Enemy’s commands [God’s moral law] in the present” in order to attain the one or avoid the other.

Art was imitating life. To defeat capitalism and achieve its utopian vision of a classless society, freed from the vices of envy and competition, Soviet communism waged a war against its own population: the abolition of private property, show trials, executions, and gulags. To prevent “the bacillus of mankind” from polluting and destroying German society, Hitler launched his “final solution” against the Jews: the ghettos, the deportations, the sterilization policies, and the death camps.

Thus, the dictatorships of the left and the right — political religions without God — each claimed to be the solution to an approaching apocalypse. Each demanded unquestioned loyalty to their political agendas. As Tolkien described Sauron: “He brooked no freedom nor any rivalry, and he named himself Lord of the Earth.” ....

Their most beloved stories — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia — upheld the irreducible dignity of the individual. Against the literary establishment, they reclaimed the concept of heroism and reinvented it for the modern mind: Their unlikely protagonists include the children of Narnia and the homely inhabitants of the Shire. As Gandalf described the hobbits: “Soft as butter they can be, yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots.”

During the crisis years of 1933 to 1945, when the world descended into an abyss of grievances, propaganda, and state-sanctioned violence, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis stood together in the breach. They offered a vision of human life — rooted in a deeply Christian outlook — that embraced humility, self-denial, and the rejection of worldly power. .... (more)

Joseph Loconte, "Lessons About Power from Middle-earth," National Review, Nov. 8, 2025.

"It's not gonna rain forever"

Randy Newman:

You can stand alone or with somebody else
Or stand with all of us, together
If you can believe in something bigger than yourself
You can follow the flag forever

They say it's just a dream some dreamers dreamed
That it's an empty thing  that really has no meaning
They say it's all a lie but it's not a lie
I'm going to follow the flag 'til I die

Into every life a little rain must fall but it's not gonna rain forever
You can rise above—you can rise above it all
We will follow the flag together
We will follow the flag forever

Antisemitism

I always enjoy reading Kevin Williamson and usually agree with him. From today's "The Antisemitism Grift," and once again, I like what he writes:

One of the bits of Christian civilization that limps on in our time is the seedbed of antisemitism. It is a supreme irony: The central figure in Christianity is—I do not write was—a Jew, a Jewish man from a Jewish family who lived, until the advent of an extraordinary career, an ordinary Jewish life in a Jewish land. Christianity is not Judaism, and its fundamental claims are incompatible with Jewish orthodoxy. Pope John Paul II taught Christians to think of the Jewish people as “our elder brothers in faith,” and that seems to me the right way to go about it—a serious difference, but a loving disagreement within the family. It is, I think, the endurance of Jews that drives Christians a little bit mad—or a lot mad, at times—as though the Christian failure to entirely assimilate the Jewish people into our religion (its fragments) and into our Weltanschauung were the mark of some sort of a divine rebuke. Like much of what ails Christianity, this trouble stems from a Christian refusal to believe our own dogma and a Christian failure to understand that dogma in the first place. We behave as though God were unable to attend to His Own affairs, including His ongoing business with His chosen people. That is the democratic spirit in religion: the urge to give the Architect of the Universe a little nudge, here and there, and a little advice. (more, possibly behind a paywall)

Kevin D. Williamson, "The Antisemitism Grift," The Dispatch, Nov. 3, 2025.

Chivalry

Kevin DeYoung on a worthy aspiration:

We need heroes from the past, as well as inspiration for the present. And the knight has proved to be an enduring symbol of valor for almost a thousand years. But if Christian men are going to aspire to be these heroic defenders of Christendom, we ought to know what these knights were supposed to be like. ....

As medieval historian Maurice Keen explains in his book, Chivalry, the knight had three basic duties. The first duty was to defend the faith of Christ against unbelievers (note: not to wield the sword against other Christians). His next duty was to defend his earthly lord. His third responsibility was to protect the weak. In pursuit of these duties, the knight might be sent on a crusade far away, or he might be asked to exercise his responsibilities closer to home.

As important as these obligations were, the manner in which the knight carried them out was as important as the duties themselves. .... The chivalric ideal identified and codified which acts and which attitudes were considered honorable. Chivalry prized bravery, fortitude, and physical prowess—but also humility, gentlemanly behavior, and courtliness toward women. The two sets of virtues were never to be separated. At all times, the knight was to be noble and courteous. ....

What is missing from the present version of manly bravery is the insistence that charging into battle requires the “heavy burden” of virtue—and not just one virtue (fortitude), but all of them (prudence, justice, and temperance). If today’s would-be knights are serious about exercising Christ’s dominion on the earth, they must first be serious about exercising dominion over themselves—over their speech, over their anger, over their petty vindictiveness. It is not enough that we are ready to fight. We must also be courteous and not base, fair and not ruled by our passions, gracious and not a scoundrel. ....

There is nothing noble in fighting for its own sake. The devil knows how to prowl and devour and fight as well as anyone. Every culture celebrates warriors of one kind or another. Often, they are bloodthirsty and cruel. What the best of Christendom called knights to be was a different kind of warrior—humble, honest, fair, dignified in speech and gracious in character. That’s the chivalrous hero we ought to emulate, not the brawler who thinks self-restraint is for sissies and courtesy is for cowards. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung, "In Search of Chivalry," Clearly Reformed, Oct. 30, 2025.

No fear!

As Halloween approaches, it is useful for the more excitable among us to be reminded that the Evil One has already been defeated. From "Concerning Halloween" by James B. Jordan:

.... "Halloween" is simply a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve. The word "hallow" means "saint," in that "hallow" is just an alternative form of the word "holy" ("hallowed be Thy name"). All Saints’ Day is November 1. It is the celebration of the victory of the saints in union with Christ. The observance of various celebrations of All Saints arose in the late 300s, and these were united and fixed on November 1 in the late 700s. The origin of All Saints Day and of All Saints Eve in Mediterranean Christianity had nothing to do with Celtic Druidism or the Church’s fight against Druidism (assuming there ever even was any such thing as Druidism, which is actually a myth concocted in the 19th century by neo-pagans.) ....

The Biblical day begins in the preceding evening, and thus in the Church calendar, the eve of a day is the actual beginning of the festive day. [emphasis added] Christmas Eve is most familiar to us, but there is also the Vigil of Holy Saturday that precedes Easter Morn. Similarly, All Saints’ Eve precedes All Saints’ Day.

The concept, as dramatized in Christian custom, is quite simple: On October 31, the demonic realm tries one last time to achieve victory, but is banished by the joy of the Kingdom.

What is the means by which the demonic realm is vanquished? In a word: mockery. Satan’s great sin (and our great sin) is pride. Thus, to drive Satan from us we ridicule him. This is why the custom arose of portraying Satan in a ridiculous red suit with horns and a tail. Nobody thinks the devil really looks like this; the Bible teaches that he is the fallen Arch-Cherub. Rather, the idea is to ridicule him because he has lost the battle with Jesus and he no longer has power over us. ....

Similarly, on All Hallows’ Eve (Hallow-Even – Hallow-E’en – Halloween), the custom arose of mocking the demonic realm by dressing children in costumes. Because the power of Satan has been broken once and for all, our children can mock him by dressing up like ghosts, goblins, and witches. The fact that we can dress our children this way shows our supreme confidence in the utter defeat of Satan by Jesus Christ – we have NO FEAR! .... (more)

Biblical Horizons » Concerning Halloween

"The Giant"

I have always enjoyed good illustrators who capture the characters or circumstances described in good books well. My favorite has long been N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945). I have collected images of many of his paintings and use them as my ever-changing desktop background. A while back, I joined a Facebook group called "The N.C. Wyeth Fan Club," and have contributed a few of the images I have collected. By far, the most popular of my contributions is the one I posted yesterday: "The Giant" (1923). Right now, there are over 680 "likes" with more constantly appearing.

A comment on Facebook informs me that the painting is hung in the dining room of Westtown School in West Chester, PA. It was "a memorial commissioned by the Westtown School Class of 1910 for their deceased classmate, William Clothier Engle."

Poirot and twelve suspects

In the mail yesterday arrived a 4K Blu-ray of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974) from Kino Lorber. Watched it last night, and it was a completely enjoyable experience. My favorite Poirot is David Suchet, but an almost unidentifiable Albert Finney (fat suit, waxed mustache, etc.) was fine. The rest of the cast included Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, and Michael York. A remarkable gathering of film stars — none got top billing. Another star in the film was the train itself, looking very much like the actual train as presented in documentaries. I saw another such documentary the other day about the food served on that train during the 1930s, and enjoyed seeing what appeared to be some of the same in the movie. The plot is well presented. And the photography is beautiful. Whether the 4K version looks better than a Blu-ray, I can't say. I haven't read the book in years, but it is one of her most famous plots and the movie seemed faithful. If you like Christie, I recommend this film version. I also have the PBS Mystery version with David Suchet as Poirot and like it, too.

From agnosticism to belief

From Barton Swaim's review of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously:

.... A Christian friend, asked by Mr. Murray how he had come to faith, named C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis’s argument that Jesus couldn’t have been a “great moral teacher” if he wasn’t the Son of God, as he claimed to be, grabbed Mr. Murray’s attention. The usual response—that the Gospels don’t record what Jesus said and did, and that belief in his divinity was a much later invention—led Mr. Murray to read an array of books on the four Gospels’ origins. (In a series of vignettes, Taking Religion Seriously lists all the books the author read in his journey from agnosticism to belief.)

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened? .... (more)

Barton Swaim, "Taking Religion Seriously Review: Faith Makes a Comeback," Oct. 17, 2025.

It isn't just phonics

In "There Are No Silver Bullets for Illiteracy" the author explains what some states are doing right about teaching literacy. A curriculum reform that has to be a part of the solution was recommended by E.D. Hirsch some time ago. Phonics is necessary but not sufficient.

...[C]reating literate children is a years-long process. As phonics advocates rightly point out, children must first understand how to decode words through phonics instruction. But phonics is only the beginning. To progress further, children—especially children from low-income households who aren’t exposed to significant background knowledge at home—need lots and lots of factual knowledge about the world. To get there, it helps to have motivated teachers who appropriately teach phonics in the early grades, and then switch over to building knowledge in the later ones. It helps to motivate students—including through retention policies and curricula that are designed to be interesting. It also helps to have frequent assessments so struggling students can be identified and helped. ....

...[T]eaching general reading comprehension skills is not useful if kids don’t have enough background knowledge to actually understand what they are reading. Even if I know to look for the main idea in a passage, that study tip does me no good if the passage is still inscrutable when I read it. Yet many schools focus on this kind of attempted “skill development,” without a recognition that comprehension, reading, and writing skills follow mastering content, and not the other way around. .... (more)

Ivana Greco, "There Are No Silver Bullets for Illiteracy," The Dispatch, Oct. 16, 2025.

Amicable adversaries

From Robert Louis Stevenson in "Talk and Talkers":

.... There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may, wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies. ....

It is the mark of genuine conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of common friends. .... Good talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. .... [T]he true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while, yet we have it, and to be grateful for forever.

Robert Louis Stevenson, "Talk and Talkers," Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson (1906)

Where you belong

Reposted because I love it:

Tell me, where is the road I can call my own That I left, that I lost So long ago? All these years I have wandered Oh, when will I know There's a way, there's a road That will lead me home

After wind, after rain When the dark is done As I wake from a dream In the gold of day Through the air there's a calling From far away There's a voice I can hear That will lead me home

Rise up, follow me Come away, is the call With the love in your heart As the only song There is no such beauty As where you belong Rise up, follow me I will lead you home

"Chesterton's fence"

Seen on Twitter a while back:

Daniel could, of course, have searched for and easily found a definition online.

This is the passage from G.K. Chesterton:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were, for some reason, loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, .... (The Thing, 1929)

"Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

From "Athanasius against the world." Well worth reading (but it may be behind a paywall):

Seventeen hundred years ago, in a.d. 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine invited all the bishops of the world to assemble at Nicaea, in modern-day Turkey. The Council of Nicaea rejected the heresy of Arius, who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. It composed a creed that (with some additions) is recited around the world today. It also set in motion a wrestling match of church and state engaging each other in the halls of history down through the generations.

A popular notion of that history laments “the Constantinian Church.” By this account, the church lost its integrity in consorting with the emperor. It joined the establishment and ever since has tended to align with hierarchies of secular power.

Of course, there’s a measure of truth in this paradigm. Constantine played a large role at Nicaea, and the church has often suffered through entanglement with regimes. But the larger story of Nicaea presents a much different balance of facts. For 50 years after the council, the Roman State supported the Arian heretics and oppressed the orthodox faith. A few courageous bishops resisted, and the laity stood firm. That is the story of Saint Athanasius and the fight for the Nicene Creed. ....

Arius first announced his heresy around the year 318. He reasoned that the biblical concept “Son,” “begotten of the Father,” implies a beginning. Therefore, the Son is not eternal as God the Father is eternal. He was created out of nothing, different in nature from God, as we are. ....

Constantine utterly misunderstood the significance of the issue. Arius’s opponents perceived it clearly. If Christ is not God, the Good News loses force. Our redemption depends on God’s entry into the world and His self-sacrifice. If Christ were merely a creature adopted by the Father, or a demiurge projected into the world, Christianity would fade away among all the Gnostic and Neoplatonic sects of the Hellenistic era. .... (more)

John D. Hagen Jr., "Athanasius against the world," National Review, Sept. 18, 2025.

The hope of a Christian

Last weekend, I attended a memorial service for a Christian believer who was a pastor and a friend. I came across this today: from the The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. This prayer appears at the end of the service for "The Burial of the Dead."

MERCIFUL God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life, in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; and whosoever liveth, and believeth in Him, shall not die eternally; who also hath taught us (by his holy apostle Saint Paul) not to be sorry, as men without hope, for those who sleep in Him: We meekly beseech Thee, O Father, to raise us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness, that, when we shall depart this life, we may rest in Him, as our hope is this our brother doth, and that, at the general resurrection in the last day, we may be found acceptable in Thy sight, and receive that blessing which Thy well-beloved Son shall then pronounce to all who love and fear Thee, saying, 'Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world': Grant this, we beseech Thee, O merciful Father, through Jesus Christ, our mediator and redeemer. Amen.

Amazon sells The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition (InterVarsity) for a little over $20.00.

Deliverance

Robinson Crusoe is, of course, a classic work of fiction. Few, I suspect, think of it as a work of Christian fiction. The illustration is by N.C. Wyeth, followed by a commentary on quotations from the book.

Three times a verse of Scripture comes to Robinson Crusoe in an hour of special need.

The first came in a spell of sickness. Recalling that the Brazilians used tobacco as a medicine, he searched in one of the chests for a roll of tobacco — and found a Bible. This he opened casually, and the first words that came to him were, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." (Psalm 50:15).

"The words," he wrote in his diary, "were very apt to my case, and made some impression on my thoughts at the time…though not so much as they did afterwards. .... Before I lay down I did what I had never done in all my life: I kneeled down and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me."

The second occasion was during a sense of sin. Recovered from his sickness, he began reading in the New Testament with the not uncommon result that he had found himself more deeply and sincerely affected with the wickedness of his past life. "Now," he records, "I began to construe the words mentioned above, 'Call upon me, and I will deliver thee,' in a different sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no notion of anything being called deliverance, but my being delivered from the captivity I was in…the island was certainly a prison to me…but now I learned to take it in another sense.

Now I looked back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appeared so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort…. And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction." .... (more)

"Robinson Crusoe and the Bible"

The intrinsic value of a human being

A humane society requires an understanding that precedes politics:

.... Classics in the history of Western thought place a strong emphasis on the moral and familial institutions that precede the State. The State must preserve these prior bonds and arrangements to retain its legitimacy, as the State is beholden to the natural dictates of morality, never capable of floating free of them. In his 2011 address to the German Bundestag in Berlin, Pope Benedict XVI succinctly articulated the essence of the pre-political:

The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person, and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and rob it of its completeness. (Pope Benedict XVI, “The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundation of Law”)

As referenced by this quote, the value of a human person is at the heart of the pre-political. However you attempt to explain this value, it surely cannot be derived from the political. If so, the failure of any given political regime to recognize human value would mean that human beings under that political arrangement are valueless. If we wish to preclude this possibility, we need a metaphysics of the human person that precedes the political and that can deliver us something like intrinsic value. This is the kind of value that can constrain the political instead of being its subject. .... (more)

Laura Siscoe, "To Fix Politics, Think About What Comes Before Politics," Fusion.

Sons of the Father

From the final chapter of John R.W. Stott's Basic Christianity, "Being a Christian":

We saw earlier that our sins had alienated us from God. They had come as a barrier between us. Put differently, we were under the just condemnation of the Judge of all the earth. But now through Jesus Christ, who bore our condemnation and to whom by faith we have become united, we have been "justified," that is, brought into acceptance with God and pronounced righteous. Our Judge has become our Father. "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are," wrote John. "Father" and "Son" are the distinctive titles which Jesus gave to God and to himself, and they are the very names which he permits us to use! By union with him we are permitted to share something of his own intimate relation to the Father. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century AD, well expresses our privilege when writing about the Lord's Prayer:

How great is the Lord's indulgence! How great are his condescension and plenteousness of goodness towards us, seeing that he has wished us to pray in the sight of God in such a way as to call God Father, and to call ourselves sons of God, even as Christ is the Son of God—a name which none of us would dare to venture on in prayer, unless he himself had allowed us thus to pray.

Now at last we can repeat the Lord's Prayer without hypocrisy. Previously the words had a hollow sound; now they ring with new and noble meaning. God is indeed our Father in heaven, who knows our needs before we ask and will not fail to give good things to his children.

It may be necessary for us sometimes to receive correction at his hand, "for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." But in this he is treating us as sons and disciplining us for our good. With such a Father, loving, wise and strong, we can be delivered from all our fears.

John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity, Eerdman's Publishing, 1974.

Identifying the enemy

"How do we fight nothing?"

Nihilism’s root is nihil, Latin for “nothing.” No meaning. Empty; soulless. What we see is all there is. Nothing else. Nothing beyond. Nothing more. Nothing. What is the meaning? What is gained? What is lost? What is the point? Nothing.

Decades ago, Pope John Paul II popularized the phrase “culture of death.” A culture of death is a culture of nihilism. No meaning to life, nothing to aim toward or organize around, no intrinsic worth or dignity to each person, and no standard of what is good, right, and true to guide and govern us. ....

In C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon coaches his nephew on how to demonize human subjects. To corrupt the soul of a person, he says, the apprentice demon must get his subjects to misidentify the enemy. Using satirical fiction, Lewis was warning readers not to confuse our real foe. ....

The modern playbook for mobilizing others is to sow seeds of fear and harvest actions in service of someone else’s agenda. Such ground is fertilized, writes 20^th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt, under conditions of isolation. Loneliness, she says, heightened in an antisocial century, “prepares men for totalitarian domination.” Related, Kyla Scanlon writes, “Anxiety creates the psychological conditions that algorithms exploit.” ....

When unity is lost, when our bonds crumble, when we literally dis-integrate—who gains? Yes, promoters, programmers, platformers, propagandists, and politicians gain. But who else benefits, spiritually speaking?

I think we are in a war. And there are forces corrupting our souls and stirring our angst.... But let us not misidentify the enemy, which must be named: evil, sin, meaninglessness, and nihilism. Nothing.

So, what do we do? How do we fight? Specifically, how do we fight nothing?

We fight nothing with something. Christians point to something—they point to Someone.

In the Gospel of John Chapter 6, the crowd following Jesus began to leave him. His teaching was hard. They did not like his absolutist claims. He failed to meet their expectations of the coming Messiah. Jesus asked the 12 disciples if they, too, wanted to leave. “Lord, to whom can we go?” responded the Apostle Peter. “You have the words of eternal life.” The most powerful response to nothingness is that which is eternal. Nihilism must not, will not, have the last word. Echoing Peter, Christians ultimately believe meaning, hope, and life are found in a person. .... (more)

Kevin Brown, "Our Real Enemy in the Culture Wars Is Nihilism," The Dispatch, Sept 21, 2025.

Where I live

I've lived on Madison's isthmus since 1982. I had been "surplused" from LaFollette High School because I was the junior member of the department. I had no idea where I would be teaching in the fall, so I decided to find a place to live in the center of the city and moved into the brand new Capitol Centre on the day it opened. I've lived here ever since, although I did move apartments a couple of times to get further from street noise and, finally, to get a much bigger balcony.

The pictures are of the apartment where I have lived for the last couple of decades. I have nested.

My study, where I spend much of the day:

 

 

The living room, balcony beyond:

 

 

 

The bedroom. The bed is seldom made:

 

 

 

The balcony, where I spend hours when the weather permits:

 

 

Autumn

Beginning in 1907 and annually from the 1930s to the '90s, the Sunday Chicago Tribune would publish these on the front page at some point in the fall. The cartoonist was a nationally famous Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon.

The story of the cartoon is here

"Further up and further in"

I've been reading C.S. Lewis and books and articles about him for a very long time, but I knew little about what Jews think about him. I'm curious about how representative this is. From Rabbi Mark Gottlieb on "C.S. Lewis and the Jews":

C.S. Lewis, the Oxbridge scholar, literary giant, and religious apologist, is arguably every Orthodox Jew’s favorite Christian author. My own extended engagement with Lewis may be representative of this feature of contemporary Jewish intellectual life. I first encountered Lewis as a student in an AP English class at my Manhattan yeshiva high school some forty years ago. .... Lewis has been a lifelong companion and guide, a religious and intellectual lodestar for me and so many other faithful Jews. Why has this Belfast-born Anglican writer and lay theologian held such sway over me and so many of my coreligionists?

The reasons for Lewis’s popularity among believing Jews are easy enough to identify. He is a world-class polymath, deftly shuttling between the discourses of imaginative literature soaked in spirituality and hard-headed, analytic dialectic in defense of traditional religious beliefs like creation, the reality of good and evil, reward and punishment, theodicy, the afterlife, and the purpose of prayer. As a champion of creedal religion living in the university and popular literary cultures of modernity, Lewis is a skillful role model for rationality and imagination in the service of a biblical worldview, values and dispositions desperately needed by today’s tradition-oriented seekers. But if learned Jews, from laymen to rabbinic giants, think so highly of Lewis, a similar question might be asked in reverse: what did Lewis think of Judaism and the Jews who played a significant role in his life? ....

...[L]ate in life, Lewis married the American poet and former radical Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, a Lower East Side–born, Bronx-bred Jewish convert to Christianity. Joy had two sons, David and Douglas, from her first husband, William Gresham, a modestly successful author with an outsized alcohol problem. With Joy’s death from cancer in 1960, the occasion of Lewis’s profound meditation, A Grief Observed, Lewis adopted the boys as his own children and did what he could, as an aging, almost-lifelong bachelor, to care for their every need. Douglas, the younger son, continued to be nurtured by the Christian home Lewis and his brother Warnie made just outside Oxford. But in the case of the older boy, David, Lewis’s support included buying new pots and pans and kosher goods from the covered market in Oxford, as Joy’s oldest son began to reclaim his ancestral Jewish identity. Lewis also consulted with his friend, the historian Cecil Roth, in whose Oxford home David would sometimes celebrate Shabbat. ....

A careful reading of Lewis’s own writing on Judaism is a decidedly more complex—and frustrating—affair. In a 1959 letter to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis flatly says that the “only living Judaism is Christianity.” ....

Lewis’s views of Judaism, while disappointing from some contemporary ecumenical perspectives, is really the best that Lewis could do. But, for me at least, none of that seriously compromises the wellspring of imaginative wisdom or doctrinal clarity Lewis so clearly offers—to the faithful Jew as well as the Christian. My rabbinical mentors who encouraged reading Lewis were suggesting, usually implicitly, that Lewis could deepen and enrich my own growing Jewish faith, giving me the language, lexicon, and, crucially, the arguments to articulate a full life of traditional Jewish belief in an age of aggressive secularism. I would soon come to realize that even more than a peerless champion of reason, Lewis created the conditions for modern religious man to redeem (or, as he preferred, “to baptize”) the imagination, consecrating the entirety of the human person, even—perhaps especially—the sensual, to his Maker. ....

Lewis is needed, now more than ever, to help men and women of faith move “further up and further in.” Jews will be much better off for the journey with him. (more)

Mark Gottlieb, "A Tale of Two Jacks: C.S. Lewis and the Jews," Public Discourse, Sept. 16, 2025.

Ugly thoughts

This seems correct. When I first engaged in social media, I was often guilty of making instant comment that I regretted almost immediately (although not "horrific, cruel, and vindictive").  Jim Geraghty:

On Friday, John Podhoretz of Commentary offered a series of posts on X that succinctly encapsulated what we’ve seen since the rise of social media and why so many previously normal-ish seeming people are suddenly blurting out the most horrific, cruel, and vindictive ideas imaginable. You should read the whole thing — I hope John turns it into a column or essay — but this is the gist:

Here’s the danger of social media. It allows people to publish their internal monologues. Our internal monologues and fantasies are often incredibly ugly. People go to therapists because they feel so guilty about them, and one of the tasks of a therapist is to explain that thoughts are not actions. You can rage in your thoughts about your brother, or someone at work, even fantasize about them dying — but you have done nothing and are guilty of nothing, and you need to forgive yourself and learn how to calm yourself down.

Since 2007, people have [had] a means of externalizing that interior monologue....

If the world knew what was going on inside us, we would all be punished viscerally for it. Until 2007, for the most part, the world would not, could not, know. The question is, and I mean this literally: Can civilization survive now that we have been made witness to the interior lives of others?

Just about everybody’s got ugly thoughts sometimes. Thankfully, the percentage of people who act on those thoughts is pretty small; otherwise, society would be anarchy. And thankfully, most people keep those thoughts to themselves.

I would note that if you say something that violates other people’s sense of right and wrong — “I’m glad that guy is dead, I wish I had killed him myself” — in front of other people, you’re likely to see visible reactions of disapproval. You might even lose friends over it or get the sense that other people see you as a broken, hateful lunatic. That dormant sense of shame might awaken. But online, it’s much easier to dismiss those who criticize your comment, and also much easier to bask in the approval of other people, as well. ....

Jim Geraghty, "‘Consequence Culture’ Comes for the Angry Left," National Review, Sept. 15, 2025.

The Bird and Baby

The world's richest man has purchased the Oxford pub where the Inklings once met. From The Telegraph:

The most unlikely part of Ellison’s plan to put his stamp on Oxford is his purchase of one of its most historic and best loved pubs. In 2023, EIT reportedly paid the eye-watering sum of £8m for the Eagle and Child, in the centre of the city, which is being restored by Foster + Partners.

The pub, which first opened in 1684, closed its doors in March 2020 because of the pandemic and has never reopened. Until its closure, its most famous feature was the wooden plaque in the back room, known as the Rabbit Room, commemorating the literary group known as the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, who would meet there regularly to socialise and discuss their work.

It was here, when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings to the assembled company, that the academic Hugh Dyson is said to have remarked, “not another f------ elf”.

In one of the group’s last meetings, Lewis distributed literary proofs for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. ....

Ellison bought the pub from St John’s College – co-incidentally, [Tony] Blair’s old college – with a pledge to refurbish and reopen it as a place where technologists and university scholars can come to meet and exchange ideas – as well, of course, as to drink. The pub’s menu will also, apparently, become rather more refined. .... (more)

I had a drink there when in Oxford and, of course, visited the area in the pub where the Inklings would gather, usually on Tuesday. They would also meet in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College on Thursday evenings. I hope the restoration of the pub retains reference to its association with Lewis, Tolkien, and the others. The Bird and Baby picture is one I collected some time ago..

Mick Brown, "How the world’s richest man is buying up Oxford," The Telegraph, Sept. 13, 2025.

"But"

Jonah Goldberg:

...[Y]ou often hear a lot of “buts” after an event like this. When Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was murdered, there were a lot of statements along the lines of “murder is wrong, but people need to understand how bad insurance companies are.”

(It’s depressing how I had to look up the name of the innocent victim, but knew the suspect’s name by heart).

Not everybody who said that kind of thing thought they were condoning or somehow justifying murder, but some did and more came across as if they were. And that is grotesque.

When it comes to murder—not self-defense or combat in war—there is nothing one can say after the “but” that can mitigate the wrongness of murder.

Murder is axiomatically unjustifiable.

It’s literally the word we use to describe an unjustified and unjustifiable taking of a human life. Under the law, if the justification is persuasive then it’s not murder but something else, and we use other words to describe it (negligent homicide, self-defense, manslaughter, etc.). ....

When you fail to condemn a murder because you don’t like what the victim said or believed, you are suggesting at some fundamental level that some speech or ideas should be punishable by death. That is atavistic. That is literally barbaric in that it is a throwback to a time when the powerful could kill the powerless simply because they gave offense. Every person who surrenders, even at the margins, to the idea that one can justify murdering people for expressing their beliefs is not a sophisticated modern advocate of some edgy new way of thinking. They are, all of them, reactionaries at the most metaphysical level, rejecting the core convictions of not just “modernity” but of Judeo-Christian civilization itself. .... (more)

Jonah Goldberg, "There Is No ‘They.’ Only ‘We.’," The Dispatch, Sept. 12, 2025.

Politics

George Will:

Today, on both sides of the barricades, politics is practiced with a snarl. It makes people cranky, permeates everything, and in two months, will spoil innumerable Thanksgiving dinners. Why then must we have politics? ....

Trout get along swimmingly without politics. Ants and beavers collaborate building anthills and dams, and bees in apiaries have hierarchies (queens and drones), but we do not speak of the “politics” of ants, beavers and bees.

Only humans have politics, for two reasons: We are opinionated, and we are egotistical. We think our opinions are preferable to others’ opinions. Hence the primary purpose and challenge of politics is to keep the peace among such creatures living together.

Many visionary nuisances think that keeping the peace is a contemptibly modest, even banal purpose for politics. They believe that social peace — living together congenially — is not merely overrated, it is evidence of bad character: too little passion for perfecting the world. Sacrificing social peace is, they think, an inevitable price worth paying for a politics with properly elevated ambitions, including the suppression of those whose opinions and egotism are impediments to politically driven progress.

Addressing what he called, with notable understatement, “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” When he spoke, seven states had voted to secede. The nation was fractured by disagreement about the right of some human beings to own other human beings.

Today, American politics is embittered by many disagreements, but not even all of them cumulatively begin to justify the insanely disproportionate furies that so many people on both sides of the metaphoric barricades relish feeling. Perhaps they feel important, even to themselves, only when cloaked in the derivative importance that comes from immersion in apocalyptic politics. Politics too grand to settle for merely keeping the peace that gives congeniality a chance. ....

George Will, "William F. Buckley Jr. would recognize Charlie Kirk as a kindred spirit," The Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2025.

Compassion and permissiveness are not the same

"The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska" describes what happened, but also why it shouldn't have happened:

Until the...security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today. ....

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist. ....

In shying away from what is politically inconvenient, ugly, or otherwise uncomfortable, we not only cede the conversation to racist idiots, but relinquish with it all hopes of a better future. The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep.

Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed. ....

...[T]he tragedy is not just how badly this country failed to protect Iryna Zarutska from someone like Decarlos Brown Jr.—or to save Decarlos Brown Jr. from becoming the monster who killed her. It’s that we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same. In doing so, we have lost sight of the fact that a country founded on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is also founded on the promise that when you come here, you will be not just free but safe. The tragedy is that a woman who fled the terror and disorder of war for a better life in a peaceful America instead ended up, unknown to her, in an America where we have tacitly abandoned certain public spaces to the most disordered and depraved among us because enforcing the law feels mean and makes us uncomfortable. .... (more, perhaps behind a paywall)

Kat Rosenfield, "The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska," The Free Press, Sept. 8, 2025.

The best of the past

A friend thought I might appreciate this by Peggy Noonan. He was right. The excerpts below begin with a quotation from David McCullough:

.... “At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude. ....

Earlier this summer I wrote that we now routinely say and do things in our public life that are at odds with our history, that are unlike us. I focused on President Trump’s language and imagery when speaking to the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., in early June. His remarks were partisan in the extreme, even for him; it was a Trump rally, not a president addressing the troops. Elsewhere, on sending the National Guard into Los Angeles: “When they spit, we hit.” All of it, the rally and what he said, was, I said, the kind of thing we don’t do. And we mustn’t lose sight of what we don’t do. ....

You can’t be dreamy about the past and say, “It was nice then.” It was never nice, it was made by human beings. You can’t say, “People were better then.” They weren’t. But in even the recent past the allowable boundaries of public behavior were firmer, and the expectations we held for our leaders higher. And their public behavior (not private, or not necessarily private) was often preferable to the public behavior we see today. So you don’t want to live in the past, but you do want to bring the best of the past into the present. .... (more)

Peggy Noonan, "We Need to Know History, Especially Now," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2025