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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By virtue of the universities where I’ve taught I’ve been privileged to know some of the finest preachers and leaders in the Church of the Nazarene.  Hearing them preach and watching them act enabled me to draw correlations between what they believed and how they behaved.  Just recently three of them (Jim Bond; Jim Diehl; Reuben Welch) have published books that are, for me, especially interesting because they show how their theology and biblical perspectives flowed into effective ministries.  

Fleshing out a text from Exodus, “For he is a  God who is passionate about his relationship with you” (34:14, NLT), Jim Bond’s Talking, Listening, and Walking with the Relational God (Meadville, PA:  Christian Faith Publishing, c. 2024) “has been on the back burner” for many years.  Now in his eighty-eighth year, he has written the book in order to glorify Christ, joining Paul is declaring:  “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”  He “entered into relationship with Jesus at the age of five.  It would be accurate to say that throughout my life I have ‘talked, listened, and walked with the relational God’” (p. xi).  He also writes from a “simple” perspective, trying to make “God’s transforming truth simple, coherent, and livable” (p. xi).  

Reared in Pampa, Texas—a panhandle town of some 20,000 people—Bond remembers it an “idyllic place for me during my adolescence” (p. 3).  It was a good place in part because of the local Church of the Nazarene his family attended.  He loved the church, including Sunday school!  “Here I heard my teacher talk about a wonderful, mysterious man named Jesus” (p. 161).  Then one Sunday morning the pastor finished his sermon with an altar call.  Jim’s much-respected older brother, Bill, responded.  Thinking if it was good for Bill it would be good for him, Jim went forward and knelt at the altar.  The pastor’s wife knelt with him and “said, ‘Jimmy, why don’t you just open the door of your heart and invite Jesus to come in?’”  And at that moment:  “I did.  And He did!” (p. 162).  He was not a prodigal needing to be saved from a sordid life.  Instead:  “What happened to men was powerfully positive:  I was saved to a marvelous, miraculous, grace-filled life, living in intimate, personal, saving relationship with Jesus Christ” (p. 162).  

As he matured he more fully understood what it all meant, finding, with Tim Stafford, that:  “If you want a personal relationship with God, He has already done everything needed to make it possible.  We need only open the door of our heart and invited Him to come in.”  He’d found new life in Christ and he came to understand it as a part of the “prevenient grace” that drew him to Him and continues to sustain him.  In time Jim became a faithful member of the Church of the Nazarene, ever-thankful for the life-giving message he heard as a child.  In hindsight, however, he rather laments the fact that “legalism governed our behavior.”  No smoking, drinking, movies, dancing, etc. “Frankly, I did not rebel.  For the most part, I played by the rules book, and it did me no harm!  In my latter years, I have met many of our vintage who are still carrying baggage over those ‘man-made rules.’  My counsel has been:  ‘Get over it!’  It is small consolation; but I am comforted by reminding myself that the leaders, pastors, and people of that era were doing the best they had been taught.  I think legalism in my denomination is passe at this time.  Good riddance!  I am all right with guidelines, not rules!” (p. 165).  

In addition to church, young Jim Bond found basketball!  As a sophomore he started, alongside his elder brother, for the Pampa Harvesters, and they lost only two games.  The next two years they went undefeated, winning two state championships, and Jim was named first team all state.  As one of the nation’s premier athletes he then played for the South team in the all-American high school game in Kentucky.  “We won the game.  I scored fifteen points and got some key rebounds.  Following the game, I was named to the Chuck Taylor 1954 First Team High School All-American Basketball Team” (p. 168).  Following the state championship game a sports editor called him “Gentleman Jim Bond”—a label that stuck and perfectly describes him.  Many collegiate scholarships were offered him and he initially decided to attend Texas A&M.  But he felt uneasy with that decision and felt God leading him to Pasadena College, a Nazarene school that had a basketball team.  

At Pasadena he enjoyed sustained success.  Though it was a tiny college the basketball team defeated many opponents from larger schools and  Bond was “named to the NAIA all-American team during my sophomore year.”  He and some Pasadena alumni put together an AAU team that won the Southern California AAU championship and then went to the national finals, where he was named the “Most Promising Young Player of the tournament” (p. 169).  He was then asked to join the Phillips Oilers AAU team, which led to him being asked to join the U.S. Olympic team in Melbourne, Australia, though he was not part of the active roster.  Returning to school in Pasadena he continued playing basketball and become quite legendary, earning membership in several of Halls of Fame.  Throughout his storied career “Gentleman Jim” sought to both give witness to his faith and live out the Gospel while on the court.  The “greatest gratification is that it provided me a lifelong platform for witness to Christ, my Savior and Lord” (p. 171).  

Graduating from Pasadena College and marrying his wonderful sweetheart Sally, Bond attended Nazarene Theological Seminary and began his pastoral ministry.  From Olathe, KS. to Casper, WY, to College Church in Nampa, ID, he flourished as a pastor, gaining considerable attention throughout the denomination.  Then he felt called to apply for a missionary assignment and was sent to Brazil.  He and Sally began with a year of language study but unexpectedly got involved in a dispute over speaking in tongues.  After prayerfully studying the scriptures he took a position that led to his recall from the mission field!  But he was soon called to pastor Lakeview Park Church in Oklahoma City, followed by three years pastoring First Church of the Nazarene in Colorado Springs, CO.  Difficulties in that church led to him moving across the campus to become chaplain and professor of practical theology at Nazarene Bible College.  Three years later Bill Draper, president of Point Loma College in San Diego, asked him to become the special assistant to the president.  Two years later, when Draper was battling cancer, Jim took his place representing the college across the educational zone.   Following Draper’s death the college’s board of trustees elected Jim to succeed him.  He didn’t immediately respond but took a week to fast and pray.  The last day of his retreat, “Suddenly, the blessed Spirit came!  My anxieties were calmed and the Lord flooded my would with assurance of adequate grace daily for the task.”  Consequently, “Sally and I spent the next fourteen years of our lives at Point Loma.  It was the most challenging, fulfilling, and fun years of our ministry” (p. 197).  (And for those us who worked with him during those years it was a wonderful time!)  

At the General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene in 1996 Jim Bond was elected to the Board of General Superintendents, the highest office in the denomination, serving eight years in that position.  About his election—and his years of service—he says nothing!  But he does devote a number of pages to his understanding of leadership.  He sees himself as a “democratic leader” and so he has been.  Let others call you to leadership rather than seeking it.  Above all, “the leader of any Christian organization must be a fully devoted follower of Jesus who is living Christlike!” (p. 203).  Understanding this we understand why Bond devotes most of his book to theology—no doubt rooted in H. Orton Wiley’s three volume Systematic Theology studied by most Nazarene ministers 60 years ago, but amplified by a number of more recent works.  Gentleman Jim’s life bears witness to the everlasting truths he learned as a disciple of Christ.  Affirming his belief in God’s existence, he cites both distinguished scholars and personal reflections on the beauty of Colorado’s high country which has always been a vital part of his life.  God not only exists but has created all that is.  Because He is Love he made a world open to his revelation and invitation.  We can enter into a relationship with Him, listening and walking with Him.  Despite the ravages of sin, we can be restored to fellowship with our Creator.  We can not only be forgiven but cleansed and empowered by the Holy Spirit to walk rightly with Him.  

As he devotes many chapters to explaining these doctrines Bond remains ever the evangelist and pastor, urging readers to come to Christ and enjoy new life in Him.  

                                         * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

  Jim Diehl successfully pastored churches in Iowa, Georgia, and Colorado.  He served as district superintendent of Nebraska and Colorado.  And he was elected a general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, serving eight years in that office.  He worked as vice president for development at Mid-America Nazarene College for a few years and while he was there and I got to know him and his wife Dorothy, mainly because my wife Roberta did secretarial work for him.  (Many years later, when I was retiring from Point Loma Nazarene University, Jim was presiding over the district assembly.  After briefly noting my contributions to the church Jim launched into a celebration of Roberta’s expertise as his office manager!  I then recognized whom he most valued!).  Although he did many things well, Jim Diehl is best renowned for his preaching.  Few men I’ve heard have the almost magical ability to stand behind a pulpit and quickly elevate his hearers.  Mixing biblical truths and personal anecdotes with a contagious sense of humor, Diehl proclaims the Gospel in thoroughly winsome ways.  During the COVID panic, when he could not move about the country preaching, he decided (in his mid-eighties) to launch a series of pod-casts to continue his preaching ministry, calling it “10 Minutes to Refuel with Pastor Jim Diehl.”  Hundreds of folks tuned in to listen for 59 weeks.  Then a friend offered to transcribe the tapes into a book, and it’s now available:   Refuel, Refresh, Revive (Dust Jacket Media. Kindle Edition, c. 2023).  “You will need to understand,” he says, “that these were not originally written out—rather, they were spoken.”  He calls his talks “sermonettes” designed “to refuel, refresh, and revive your soul in the midst of your busy week.  They’re not “devotionals” exegeting and expositing a passage of scripture.  Nor are they structured to develop a thesis, as one does writing a book.  Rather they are texts or ideas that come to him that led him to develop a brief message.  

His first sermonette, “Mother Goose at Bear Creek Park,” recalls a time when both he was with his wife, Dorothy, were in a Denver hospital.  While there he “received a report from the urologist that I had a cancerous tumor in my bladder” that was “‘high-grade cancer, very aggressive’” (p. 16).  To process the troubling situation he took his dog for a walk in a the nearby Bear Creek Park and encountered a flock of Canadian geese.  As he approached a mother goose and her chicks she spread her wings over them to protect them.  As he walked away, Diehl saw a feather on the ground and picked it up.  At that moment, “I felt as if the Holy Spirit of God whispered in my ear, ‘That’s what I want to do for you and Dorothy. I want you to come on in close to me now and let me cover you with my feathers—and under my wings you will be safe’” (p. 17).  That led him to ponder verses from Psalm 91, which assured him that “You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor the destruction that lays waste at noonday” (vv. 5–6).  Fear not!  Then the next morning he looked out  his bedroom window and saw a feather in his backyard.  “It was not lying on the ground—it was sitting straight up.  I’ve lived here five or six years and had never seen a feather in the yard—ever!  And I haven’t seen one since.  As I picked up that feather, I really believe the Lord winked at me and said, “What do you think of that, son?  What do you think of that?”  I said, “Lord, I can’t imagine” (p. 19).  “So now I have two feathers.  I don’t worship these feathers, but they’re symbols to me that God is taking care of us, and God will take care of you!” (p. 19).  Thereafter both Dorothy and Jim came back to health and he urged hearers  “during the wonderful Easter week, resurrection Sunday, or anytime—get under the wings of God and take refuge and don’t fear.  God is bigger than any situation!  God is bigger than “What’s the matter?” Get under His wings!

In “Don’t Jump off a Bridge to Rescue a Hat,” Diehl reflects on a lesson learned at the beginning of his ministry.  Attending a conference he heard a seasoned preacher warn against unwise responses.  “He was talking about a bridge over a river.  ‘Jump off a bridge to rescue a child and you’re a hero; jump off a bridge to rescue a hat and you’re a fool.’  I knew that had to mean something high-powered.  So I wrote that down in the back of my Bible along with all the other truths I was learning.  That has come back to me over and over across the years:  ‘Don’t jump off a bridge to rescue a hat’” (p. 50).  After reflecting on the incident where Jesus healed the man at the pool of Bethesda, Diehl urged hearers to avoid wasting time worrying about or doing non-essential things.  Take, for instance, the “worship wars!”  To him it’s a “disgrace!  Worship wars!  What is that? Are we going to sing the hymns and the gospel songs?  Or are we going to sing choruses?”  Sadly:  “This issue has started more church fights than I can count:  Are we going to keep the choir and let them be part of the worship, or are we going to dismiss the choir and have a praise team? That’ll stir up the troops for sure” (p. 52).  After pointing out similar issues that distract us, Diehl confessed that he was recently worrying about an issue and “said, ‘Lord, what are we going to do about this?’  The Lord said to me in my mind, ‘I didn’t die on the cross for a structure; I died to win people to Jesus.’  I let the thing go; I had to move on.  You know, it’s a hard thing to keep ‘the main thing the main thing,’ but that’s my plea with you today and with me, that . . . we refuse to jump off a bridge for a hat.  May we live to focus on the main things— not the minor things that don’t make an eternal difference anyway” (p. 53).

Discussing two of the persistent temptations we face—“If Only” and “What If ?”—Diehl urges us to focus on what is, not what might have been.  Satan works us over with “simple words:  If only.  Yes, If only.  If only I’d never moved to this town.  If only I had graduated when I had a chance.  Now, we need to be careful with this one—If only I had never married her or married him.  If only I wouldn’t have done that stupid thing—that was more than stupid; it was wrong.  If only I had . . . If only I had not . . . If only!” (p. 124).  It’s an old, old story, evident in Numbers 14, wherein “All the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, ‘If only we had died in the land of Egypt!  Or if only we had died in this wilderness!’” If you’ve done wrong or made a mistake, Jim says, “put it under the blood of Jesus!  It is all there; I’m not going to let the devil rob me of my peace because of something in the past.”  Do you know that you cannot change the past?  So give it to God!!” (p. 125).  When we’re not obsessed with “If Only” we may get troubled by “What If?”  Reflecting one of his bouts with cancer, he confesses “the What ifs started up in my mind: ‘What if the cancer is beyond the bladder?  What if he must remove my bladder?  What if I can’t be traveling and preaching anymore because of complications?’”  But the treatments proved successful, and “I’m still feeling fine, my energy is still running strong, and God keeps opening doors for my preaching ministry.  In fact, I’m preaching more than when I was a pastor!  All of that is to say, ‘God is bigger than the What ifs.’” (p. 126).  So He Is and that’s Good News!

                                              * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

When I spoke at Point Loma College’s 40 years ago I met Reuben Welch, the college chaplain.  Returning to the campus in 1982 as a visiting professor, my wife Roberta and I became friends with Reuben and Mary Jo.  As he was retiring that year he encouraged me to consider replacing him as chaplain and doors opened for me to do so in the fall of 1983.  He was ever-encouraging and we were truly blessed to know and rely on him and Mary Jo.  When I moved into his office as chaplain, I found he’d left me a rock on which a student had painted the title of one of his books—When You Run out of Fantastic . . . Persevere.”  That simple phrase, in many ways, sums up much of his philosophy and what he stressed in his messages.  In the Church of the Nazarene he was truly a legendary preacher, leaving his imprint on numbers of young people.  In addition to preaching he published several books, most famously We Really Do Need Each Other.  Inasmuch as he is now nearly 100 years old, Reuben’s daughter Susan decided to put together some of his recorded sermons to celebrate his life and ministry.  The collection is titled I Think I Think: Vintage Sermons by Reuben Welch (Kansas City: The Foundry Publishing, c. 2024; Kindle Edition). 

In the book’s forward, Ron Benefiel (a pastor who became president of Nazarene Theological Seminary before returning to Point Loma to assume a variety of assignments) recalls that Reuben “became chaplain of Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) when I was a student there in 1968.”  The Vietnam War was igniting student protests, national leaders were assassinated, and the times were certainly challenging.  “Reuben Welch took center stage as our college chaplain in the middle of those times.  He was an engaging speaker with a great sense of humor.  But, much more than that, he was a New Testament scholar who knew how to speak words of wisdom and truth to an auditorium full of radicalized college students.  For many of us—I daresay most of us—he became one of the most influential people in our lives.  For those of us going into pastoral ministry, he was our model of what good preaching could be.  For those of us who simply needed counsel from someone over the age of thirty whom we could trust, he was the listener who showed us what it meant to care for others. We all wanted to be like Reuben!” (p. 7).  

Explaining why she selected the sermons for the book, Susan, says:  “I think I think . . .” is a phrase that’s always been associated with my dad, almost as much as “We really do need each other.”  It captures the marvelous tension he maintained between what he was sure about and what he was still considering.  That openness to new ideas, a tentativeness about non-essentials, is one of the qualities that endeared him to so many.  Preparing this collection of my dad’s sermons has been a joyful journey. I have been blessed over and over as I’ve listened to numerous cassette recordings of him preaching, some from as early as 1968.  At ninety-nine years of age, his voice is so much weaker now; getting to hear him in his prime has been a poignant treat. I have chosen ten of my favorite sermons to include in this volume, all previously unpublished” (p. 14).  For those of us who have heard him speak, reading the sermons allows us to remember how he spoke.  Reading some of the sermon’s titles—“He Did Not Have to Survive,” “When God Contradicts God,” “Give Your Bod to God”—reminds us of the phrases he coined that stick with us.  

Common to all his sermons was a healthy dose of Scripture.  Welch read extended sections and quoted many more.  One sensed that he sought to get into the heart of biblical passages and to graft them into his heart.  Unlike classic expository messages, his were extended meditations on what the scripture under consideration reveals.  He would explain and then chew on the text, repeating it and rephrasing it, wondering at what it meant for him and his hearers.  He invited hearers to think with him.  Thus the book’s title, “I Think I Think,” captures a great deal of his mode of preaching.  For example, after reading most of Hebrews 11, he noted that he hears the text telling us that “faith is not just something you have, faith is something you do!” (p.  23).  In fact, he declared:  “Faith needs to be teased a little bit into something active like ‘faithing’” (p. 26).  After revisiting the long list of biblical heroes—Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, et al.—Reuben takes us to Calvary, saying:  “‘Oh Jesus, what are you doing hanging on that cross between two thieves?”  Can you hear him?  ‘I’m faithing, I’m faithing!’  You see, it’s not just something we have; it isn’t something we carry around with us.  But. It.  Is.  Something.  We. DO.  Amen!  Well, what about us? We’re making our choices, making our decisions, walking our walk, offering our offerings, making our sacrifices, but mostly, we are living and working and walking and doing . . . That’s faithing, isn’t it?  Well, actually, I hear another word from these saints.  You know what I hear them say?  ‘It pays to hang on!’ I’m sure there is a more theological way to say that, but the only other theological term I can come up with is, ‘’Don’t quit!’” (pp. 27-28).

Don’t quit!  Hang in there!  Persevere!  That’s a consistent refrain in these sermons.  That Reuben’s done—and God willing so will we who know and love him.  

Few of us are lawyers but all of us benefit from law-abiding communities.  St Thomas Aquinas defined a law as “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.”  There are, Aquinas explained, four different kinds of law.  There is an Eternal Law, resident in the mind of God and largely known only to Him, whereby all creation functions.  We discern aspects of this in such things as the law of gravity and second law of thermodynamics.  There is also the Divine Law—Revelation—given by God to His prophets, best evident in the Ten Commandments received by Moses.  Then there is Positive Law, set forth by legislators and interpreted by judges, giving purely human decrees that are constantly changing and dramatically different in various cultures.  Setting speed limits or leveling taxes or establishing schools are all illustrations of positive laws.  

Finally, there is the Natural Law, rooted in our ability to reason, described by Moses when he gave his final address to the children of Israel, saying:   “For this commandment which I command you today is not mysterious for you, nor is it far off.  It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend into the heaven for us and bring it to its, that we may hear it and do it?  Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cover over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’  But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in hour heart, that you may do it” (Dt. 30:11-14).  Centuries later St Paul, writing the Romans, said much the same:  “for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them” (Ro 2:13-14).  

Abraham Lincoln, deeply read in the Bible, illustrated his commitment to the Natural Law in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858.  Douglas championed “popular sovereignty”—allowing the people to decide whether or not to enslave people, making laws purely conventional, rooted in whatever people momentarily desire.  He was, in today’s terms, a “pro-choice” advocate of “cultural relativism.”  For him, right and wrong were ultimately a matter of power—the power of the ballot box.  The majority rules simply because it has more votes.  It uses its power to dictate whatever it wants.  To Douglas, only positive laws authorized by the people mattered.  As Lincoln understood:  “When Judge Douglas says he ‘don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down’ . . . he can thus argue logically if he don’t see anything wrong in it; but he cannot say so logically if he admits that slavery is wrong.  He cannot say that he would as soon see a wrong voted up as voted down.  When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”

Lincoln, however, insisted there’s a higher law, a moral law, an eternally and universally true standard, that decreed slavery intrinsically wrong.  This Natural Law forever supersedes human laws.  Lincoln believed that this nation’s Founders set forth revolutionary documents (the Declaration of Independence and Constitution) rooted in  “abstract” truths “applicable to all times and places.”  He opposed slavery not because he disagreed with the legislators in Alabama or Missouri but because he thought it was immoral— something contrary to the Natural Law.  As many legal scholars explain, the same philosophical issues that divided the country in 1860 now divide us when dealing with abortion, same-sex marriage, and the notion that one can decide whether to be a man or a woman.  Nor was Lincoln alone in rejecting the legitimacy of slavery.  A Supreme Court Justice, Benjamin Curtis, dissenting from the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case, declared that slavery was condemned by the Natural Law and no number of state statutes could make it right.  

For many decades Hadley Arkes (a retired professor from Amherst College) has espoused a Natural Law ethic and effectively worked in the political sphere for legislation such as the “born alive infant protection” and “defense of marriage” acts.  A secular Jew for most of his life, he recently entered the Catholic Church, influenced by pro-life Christians defending unborn children, concluding the Church is a “truth-telling institution” that opposes relativism.  Forty years ago he cogently set forth his views in FirstThings:  An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice, and he recently reaffirmed  his positions in Mere Natural Law:  Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution (Washington, D.C.:  Regency Publishing, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  The distinguished editor of the New Criterion, Roger Kimball, says:  “Mere Natural Law deserves to be set alongside C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in its profundity and gimlet-eyed appreciation of the manifold depredations of our relativistic culture, hankering everywhere after false gods.  Arkes is a natural teacher, and his deep appreciation of the Natural Law roots of the American Founding make this book an indispensable Baedeker for our amnesiac times.”  

Arkes dedicated this book to his late wife, Judy, who remembered Lincoln’s statement that we Americans were conducting a great “experiment” in self-governance. She lamented that it now seemed as if “everything touching the terms of principle on which a people lived, the way we governed ourselves, and the moral codes by which we would try to live our lives together” was collapsing.  Perhaps, she feared, the great “experiment” was failing!  She realized that our country is now led by folks such as Barack Obama, who (in The Audacity of Hope)rejected any “absolute” truths in order to achieve what he believed is “implicit in the very idea of ordered liberty.”  For Obama and our cultural elites, relativism rules.  To Nietzshe:  “You have your way.  I have my way.  As for the right way it does not exist.”  Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes declared:  “Moral rights—if there are any—These are for the philosopher,” lacking any practical value.  He rejected moral truths, saying rights come from a gun barrel, reducing them to whatever works for those win power.  This position subsequently informed the opinion of Judge Jon Newman in Connecticut, who said:  “Abortion and childbirth, when stripped of the sensitive moral arguments surrounding the abortion controversy, are simply two alternative medical methods of dealing with pregnancy….”  To kill or not to kill an innocent child is simply a pragmatic decision without moral content. 

Arkes, looking back over the past half-century, confesses he can hardly believe “just how far the passion for relativism would unfurl—to the point where people with advanced degrees forcefully insist that we cannot tell the difference between a male and a female.  That difference now is regarded in some quarters as merely ‘assigned’ at birth.  And so we are required by the courts to affirm that a man may pronounce himself a woman—or a woman, a man—solely on the strength of an earnest report on his (or her) feelings” (p. 2).  But this confusion is easily understood once we admit to having lost the “commonsense understanding of ordinary people, in which the Natural Law finds its ground.  Cicero, reaching for the heights in his Republic, gave us the most stirring description and the loftiest hopes for the Natural Law:  that ‘there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times’” (p. 3).  

The Natural Law is both deeply moral and thoroughly logical.  As such it is rejected by progressives such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, who insist the right to abortion is the flag of freedom, far more important than freedoms of religion and speech.  Amazingly, even conservative politicians and jurists (including the late Justice Scalia) who personally oppose abortion fail to craft their case in accord with the Natural Law!  By saying individual states may decree whether or not abortion is legal they fall back into the position of Stephen Douglas—popular sovereignty!  By and large, conservatives “lost their conviction about any such anchoring truths grounded in the canons of reason, and along with that loss of conviction came a posture of mirthless derision of the Natural Law” (p. 13).  But there are inescapable “anchoring truths” evident in the Laws of Reason, especially in the Law of Contradiction.  Two contradictory propositions cannot both be true.  Self-contradictory propositions collapse into nonsense when rightly analyzed.  

This nation’s founders—including Supreme Court justices James Wilson and John Marshall—routinely cited “axioms” supporting their judgments, revealing the influence of the “common sense” philosophy of Thomas Reid.  Immediately following its ratification, Wilson insisted the Constitution was written “not to invent new rights ‘by a human establishment,’ but to secure and enlarge the rights we already have by nature” (p. 81).  “Reid caught the precise sense of this matter in his classic Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind: ‘[T]here are truths, both speculative and moral, which a man left to himself would never discover; yet when they are fairly laid before him, he owns and adopts them, not barely upon the authority of his teacher, but upon their own intrinsic evidence, and perhaps wonders that he could be so blind as to not see them before’” (p. 24).  There are things we can’t not know because they are simply self-evident.  They are always, everywhere, undeniably true—per se nota. “Thomas Jefferson caught the sense of the matter quite aptly when he remarked, in a letter to Peter Carr in August 1787, that one could ‘state a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules’” (p. 42).  When highly educated people, including a current justice on the Supreme Court, claim to not know what makes a woman a woman one rightly turns to a rancher who will explain it to her in a brief phrase!  

To illustrate this, Arkes says:  “In the fetching early pages of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis appealed to the moral understanding that can be grasped, at its root, with the common sense of ordinary people.  He conjured up some familiar lines, likely to be heard any day from ‘children as well as grownups,’ from ‘educated people as well as uneducated’: ‘They may say things like this: “How’d you like if anyone did the same to you?”—“That’s my seat, I was there first”—“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you shove in first?”—“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”—“Come on, you promised.”  People say things like that every day….’ (p. 30).  Still more:  “Lewis used the disarming example of children to teach another lesson that Aristotle had taught in his Politics:  that it is the distinct nature of human beings to complain, show outrage or a sense of grievance on matters high and low, and to be given to argument.  As Aristotle said, animals may emit sounds to indicate pleasure or pain, but the speech of human beings is of a world apart.  Human beings can offer judgments on what is good or bad, just and unjust.  They can reason over matters of right and wrong”  (p. 32).

Along with C.S. Lewis and Aristotle, Arkes finds much to admire in Thomas Aquinas, who “offered to us as the true ‘first principle of practical reason’ (primum principium in ratione practica):  ‘that good is to be done, evil to be avoided’ (bonum est faciendum et prosquendum, et malum vitandum).  That principle captures the logic of morals:  that the good is higher, more desirable than the bad; that the good should be promoted and the bad discouraged, forbidden, and at times punished” (p. 63). It just makes sense, as Aquinas saw, “that in every act we take to seek change or oppose change, we must have at least some rough understanding of what things are good or bad, better or worse.  Do we go to college or get a job?  If we get a job, is it in a legitimate business or a business skirting the law?  In any case, we move with an understanding of what things we find not only desirable or undesirable, but also right or wrong.  Those judgments form the ground of our most practical acts.  There is nothing airy about them, for they are precise enough to stir people to act.  And if people are moved in their most natural acts to seek the things they find desirable, it follows that they tend to steer away or shun the things they find undesirable or wrong.  In other words, this first principle is something we grasp a priori” (p. 65).

If we’re obliged to do good we’re equally obliged to oppose evil.  We ought nurture babies and oppose torturing them.  But following Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court routinely upheld the “right” to kill a child, irrationally refusing to acknowledge “that persistent, awkward truth: that the child has never been a part of the mother, and never anything but the same human being at any stage of the pregnancy.  Even when it came to the later stages of pregnancy, the child was referred to persistently as mere ‘potential life.’  For the sake of staying faithful to those earlier concessions of the Court, Justice Alito was content to keep using that phrase, even though he surely knew that it made no sense:  The embryo or fetus in the womb can never have been merely ‘potential life’” (p. 240).  Despite much obfuscation, the courts of the country embraced and enforced the view that Might makes Right.  Abortion was allowed not because it is good but because the people want it.  

What the courts refused to consider was the moral aspects of abortion.  And this is precisely what Aries wants done.  There is a higher law that should shape human laws.  There is a Natural Law that must be reinstated in our judicial system—and in our schools and churches.    

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In Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths:  The Touchstone of the Natural Law (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, c. 2010), Hadley Arkes collected some of his essays explaining and defending the Natural Law tradition.  He reflects that he has “expended most of my slender arts as a writer over the last thirty years in making the case for natural rights and natural law,” endeavoring to resist the pervasive “moral relativism in forms now so familiar that most people are hardly even aware of them.  Historians seem barely conscious of any vice of ‘historicism,’ but they seem to fall easily into the assumption, for example, that the American Founders were men of their own age.”  The sentiments of the Declaration of Independence and its “self-evident” truths (such as “all me were created equal”) was true enough then but perhaps not now!  Arkes has written rather prolifically, but most everything can be understood as a stout defense of the currently disfavored Natural Law

Most of the book’s chapters are focused on important Supreme Court decisions, such as Lochner v. New York and Near v. Minnesota, and are only of interest to legal scholars.  But the thrust of the book is to uphold the notion embraced by many great legal scholars such as Blackstone, who insisted there are some very clear “laws of reason and nature” that must be consulted as we promulgate and enforce human laws.  We do have a written Constitution that is worthy of our respect, but it must always be interpreted with an eye on the “first principles” of logic and ethics that are universal and ultimately definitive.  The Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments) is an important part of the Constitution, but too many judges and lawyers think it says our rights are given by the state rather than—as the Declaration of Independence insisted—God.  There has, particularly in the nation’s elite universities, come a “subtle shift … from natural rights to positive rights, from rights grounded in the nature off human beings a ‘moral agents,’ to the sense rather of rights that have standing as rights because we have decided, as a people, too confer them on one another” (p. 7).  Arkes wrote these essays to call us back to an original understanding of the Constitution as a servant of, not a lord over, the Natural Law. 

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel. Brideshead Revisted, one the characters considered the historicist claim that morality continually evolves, that what’s right today may be wrong a century from now.  He “seemed to grasp almost intuitively the logic that had to attach to the notion of ‘commending’ a ‘good.’  It was a matter of moving beyond ‘personal feelings,’ to the grounds of reason that made a thing ‘good’ for others as well as ourselves.  It was a shift from notions of good that are entirely personal, subjective, and perhaps ephemeral, to notions of a good that are reasoned, impersonal, universal, and far more enduring” (p. 13).   This was the position taken by the Founders of the United States.  A clause in the Constitution cannot mean one thing in one century and something entirely different in the next.  They could not envision the “legal positivism” espoused by Oliver Wendall Holmes that came to dominate the courts in the 20th century, and they would certainly have opposed it.  

One of the New Deal justices appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert Jackson, shared Holmes’ positivism when serving on the Supreme Court.  But when he was acting as prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, seeking to punish prominent Nazis, he invoked the Natural Law!  The tradition he had rejected was the only one capable of bringing criminals to justice.  They hadn’t violated German laws, but they were guilty of something worse, violating universal moral principles.  It’s simply wrong to deliberately kill innocent people, even when the laws of your nation prescribe it.  So Jackson and his colleagues insisted the Nazis be hanged not because they violated a written law but because they failed to follow “those deeper principles of what we used to call ‘common sense,’ even without the law” (p. 37).  These principles, as. Immanuel Kant said, are uniquely found in “a rational being.”  They are what Aristotle (in Posterior Analytics) said “the primitive, immediate principles” that resemble axioms in geometry.  If you cannot simply see that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line you will never advance in understanding plain geometry!  So too, James Wilson, a member of the Supreme Court in the 1790s, relied on “principles of reason” that enable us to know anything at all.  There are simply “self-evident” truths easily grasped by rational creatures.  Aquinas said they are understood per se nota, absolutely true when seen.  If you cannot understand the law of contradiction when it’s stated you’ll never get it!  

Defending the proposed Constitution of the United States in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton said:  “In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.  These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind…. Of this nature are the maxims in geometry that the whole is greater than its parts….  Of the same nature are the other maxims in ethics and politics” (No. 31).  Certain ethical principles have been embraced may millions of men throughout many centuries. Don’t steal.  Don’t bear false witness!  Don’t covet!  Don’t murder!   “And yet, in our own day, these classic arguments, grounded in the plainest things we can know, have actually been derided and rejected by the orthodoxies now dominant on American campuses.  The fashionable doctrines of postmodernism and radical feminism have denied that we can know moral truths, let alone truths that hold across different countries and cultures.  And at the foundation of everything, the exponents of the doctrines often deny that there is really a human nature.  What we take to human nature they regard as ‘social constructs’ that vary from one place to another according to the vagaries of local cultures” (p. 47).  Thus we have eminent scholars who condemn killing on the basis of race but defend admitting students to universities because they meet racial quotas!  

On his final page Arkes restates what he has repeatedly asserted:  “The task is to trace matters back to the root, to those first principles that anchor our judgments.”  If one studies carefully:  “Beneath the layers of law, embedded now in custom, is a structure of moral argument and moral understandings.  Those anchoring, first principles explain, at the root, the grounds of our judgments on the things that are right or wrong, just or unjust.  If we can return to the root, with an inquiry that is distinctly philosophic, we can expect to tap again the deeper principles of the law; and in opening them anew, see again their fuller reach.  At the end of the day and the end of the exercise, we find ourselves, as we often do, conforming an older wisdom.  We may merely remind ourselves of what that first generation of Americans managed to grasp when they said, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, that ‘no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue’—and a ‘frequent appeal to first principles’” (p. 262).

James Lindsay holds a Ph.D. in mathematics but has turned his attention to cultural issues in a series of books, including Cynical Theories, that his critics claim are far right and nationalistic.  He has, however, been praised by both Stephen Pinker, a Harvard University psychologist, and and Al Mohler, a conservative Southern Baptist, who are anything but bedfellows.  He does meticulous research, documents his findings, and certainly provides perspectives worth considering.  In The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (New Discourses, c. 2022, Kindle Edition) he argues that much of the modern educational establishment has been deeply influenced by a self-identifying Brazilian Marxist.  He begins with an anecdote.  Following the tragic killings in a Uvalde, Texas, school, a legislator in Providence, Rhode Island—who calls herself a “queer educator” and “abortion funder”—urged students to walk out of their classes and take to the streets to protest gun violence, which they did.  Neither she nor the educational establishment seems overly concerned by the fact that 94% of Providence students aren’t proficient in math and 86% can’t read or write on grade level.  But they’re quite adept at staging a protest at the state capitol.  The reason for this, Lindsay thinks, is that “education has been stolen right out from under us and from our children.  This theft of education has a purpose; it enables a counterfeit to replace it.  The mechanism and description of this gigantic educational ripoff can be summarized in a single sentence:  Our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools” (p. 7).

Many years ago I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and took it as an example of the impact Marxism was having in Latin and South America, especially in the “liberation theology” widely espoused within Christian (mainly Catholic) circles.  In fact, Freire may be rightly understood as one of the liberation theologians of his era.  Little did I imagine that Pedagogy of the Oppressed would become widely praised and utilized in the United States.  But by 1995 it had become part of the curricula in schools of education and and “the intervening quarter century has seen enough turnover of the teachers to have fundamentally remade our schools and thus education itself.  Kids still go to school, but school isn’t school anymore. The teachers have been replaced with activists, and education has been turned into ‘conscientization,’ the process of seeing the world from the so-called standpoint of the oppressed” (p. 16).  Still more:  Freire is also widely cited in educational journals—generally called “Critical Pedagogy” or “Critical Education Theory.”  In fact:  Freire is “the third most-cited scholarly author in all of the humanities and social sciences by authoritative metrics” (p. 15).

Rooted in the revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Marx, Freire wanted to transform his world.  He especially sought to overcome the damage done by colonialism, so he generally romanticized precolonial, primitive societies wherein “noble savages” thrived.  Thus the call to “decolonize the curriculum!” Get rid of dead, white males!  “Decolonizing the curriculum means replacing articles of ‘formal education’ or ‘literacy’” with a more Woke Course of studies.  “The English literature curriculum has to be ‘decolonized’ by removing Shakespeare” and introducing more “relevant” texts celebrating diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Even mathematics must “be replaced with ‘ethnomathematics’ (and even the wildly nonsensical ‘mathematx’) for the same ‘decolonization’ purpose” (p. 138).  Consequently:  “Education, for Freire, is going to be a process of learning to ‘transform reality,’ which is the essential Marxist project” (p. 47).  This begins by constantly criticizing the world as it is—finding fault with institutions, historical heroes, classical art and music.  Embracing Marx’s call for a “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” Freirian educators should plow up the soil and plant new seeds rather than water what is already growing.  Pointing out the “contradictions” in the status quo enables teachers to point to how things should be if the revolution transforms them.  Traditional education, with its emphasis on mastering certain subjects, such as reading and mathematics, oppresses students by readying them to cooperate with an unjust society.  Most of us want youngsters to simply become literate, butFreire calls for “political literacy”—learning to use words and launch movements to advance a leftist agenda.  Learning to read books is less important than learning to agitate in the streets.  This follows Karl Marx’s goal of getting power in order to transform the world.  By looking at things from the side of the world’s “oppressed,” students are encouraged to “die and be resurrected” and enlist in the “permanent struggle” for liberation. 

Freirian teachers are not purveyors of knowledge intent in imparting what’s known to their students.  They are, rather, “facilitators” determined to work alongside school kids critiquing the status quo and drafting utopian plans for a better world.  They are to become “change agents” protesting global warming or supporting Hamas massacring Jews.  Large numbers of public schools embrace a program called “Transformative Social-Emotional Learning” (SEL) designed to do precisely such things.  It’s a form of “emotional manipulation” whereby an alleged teacher becomes an “unlicensed social worker” or “unqualified psychologist” doing anything but providing instruction in grammar and geography.  “Our kids currently go to Paulo Freire’s schools,” Lindsay says in his concluding section.  “These schools are unambiguously Marxist (unless we split hairs and call them neo-Marxist or Woke Marxist) in their architecture, pedagogy, methods, and goals. They have abandoned the idea of educating American children to grow toward becoming successful and prosperous adults in American society because they want to undermine, destroy, and replace American society.  Rather than teaching literacy, numeracy, or other educational basics, Freirean schools use subject matter like reading, writing, mathematics, history, social studies, and science lessons to teach Marxist consciousness of one or more forms at a time.  As a result of more than a decade of this practice, American schoolchildren are almost universally failing in basic competency in virtually every subject at virtually every grade level.”  Lindsay insists “correcting the problem of Freirean education is a high-priority item,” for it’s indoctrination rather than education.  Indeed it is a form of progressive religion that should be removed from public schools. 

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Pete Hegseth, who cohosts FOX & Friends Weekend, wrote Battle for the American Mind (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2022;  Kindle Edition) with assistance from David Goodwin (a businessman who helped found The Ambrose School in Boise, Idaho) to emphasize classical Christian education.  Hegseth declares:  “It is my brokenness that brings me to this book.  Our brokenness.  Nothing but the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ affords these two authors—Pete Hegseth (me) and David Goodwin—the sufficiency to undertake such an audacious task:  writing a book that motivates others to reorient their lives around the education of their most precious gift—their children and grandchildren.” (p. xv).  The authors want something better than the progressive pedagogy they received and most of our their children are receiving.  Goodwin has done the research and Hegseth uses his rhetorical skill to make the case for taking a different (if ancient) approach to educating the nation’s youth.

Hegseth earlier published two “books on the fight for the future of America,” but he thinks this one more important.  Abraham Lincoln rightly said that “the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation becomes the philosophy of government in the next,” and Hegseth, along with many parents, suddenly discovered what was happening in the schoolrooms when they shut down during the COVID panic.  “Seemingly out of nowhere—and accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020—concepts like white privilege and systemic racism and even a new founding date for America, the year 1619, were splashed across computer screens all over America.  Critical race theory had fully arrived (often masked as ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’), along with a full-on attempt to redefine gender, infuse climate fatalism, and turn our children into activists. These types of revelations were powerful because they were not the result of media exposure, but instead a bottom-up, and often apolitical, recognition by parents that the very foundation of American education had taken a radical turn. It was the ‘woke’ versus the newly awake.  You might call it the COVID-(16)19 effect” (p. 5).  This is appalling apparent when, for example,  you learn that the National Archives warns on-line viewers interested in copies of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, only to be “met with a warning—right at the top of each document—that says ‘Harmful Language Alert’” (p. 14).  Tellingly, when Joe Biden entered the White House he “abolished the ‘1776 Commission’—a last-ditch effort created by President Donald Trump to reject the 1619 narrative and reinstall traditional American history” (p. 36).

The battle taking place in America results Marxist-inspired movements determined to transform her.  Today’s Marxists want to control the culture and naturally target the nation’s schools.  They “control every strong point, every choke point, and every inch of high ground in the realm of American education, and by extension, American culture” (p. 27).  Powerful teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)—promote the Marxist agenda by imposing Critical Race Theory and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).  Amazingly, in 1972 the NEA hired Saul Alinsky to train its staff and issued a document—Alinsky for Teacher Organizers declaring “that teachers should be used to organize, not just for changes in the classroom, but for social change” (p. 37).  In addition to concerns for race, class, and gender, union bureaucrats want to “deconstruct” the nation’s history and constitutional principles.  For them, “our Western Judeo-Christian roots are the problem—they must be dismantled, one theory, one word, one classroom, and one mind at a time” (p. 32).  Thus, as former New York governor Andrew Cuomo said:  “We’re not going to make America great again, it was never that great.”  Cuomo’s view was evident in the “Common Core” curriculum prescribed for the nation’s schools a decade ago, pushing the historical positions of Howard Zinn’s A Popular History of the United States.  “It is not hyperbole to state,” Hegseth says, “that no other book has had a greater impact on the minds of American youth for the past forty years. When not assigned in classrooms, it has been fully incorporated into the mass-produced textbooks in our classrooms.  Zinn’s view of history is enmeshed in American classrooms. The unions love it, endorse it, and teach it” (p. 40).  Zinn openly espoused socialism and was patently anti-American.  To Hegseth, Zinn’s book was “written from the perspective of the Soviet Union” and designed to “make America look like an evil country.”  Tellingly, “ the NEA—the nation’s largest labor union—openly works hand in hand with the ‘Zinn Education Project’” (p. 40).  

Recognizing how the public schools have been radically transformed, Hegseth thinks classical Christian schools, implementing Western Christian Paideia (WCP), are much needed.  “Paideia, simply defined, represents the deeply seated affections, thinking, viewpoints, and virtues embedded in children at a young age, or, more simply, the rearing, molding, and education of a child.  Classical Christian education creates a paideia unique in all of human history—one that enables freedom” (p. 44).  Western Civilization, over the centuries, blended the best of Athens and Jerusalem, establishing a priceless heritage that must be recovered and celebrated.  Throughout the 20th century American Progressives rejected the Western Christian Paideia in order to establish a fully humanistic agenda, believing (in accord with Woodrow Wilson)  “that most people just needed a vocational education—they had no use for a free-man’s (classical) education” (p. 93).  Trained to get jobs rather than wisdom, students learned little of “divine Truth.”  C.S. Lewis saw this clearly a century ago, noting that, rightly defined, “education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves. . . . If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.” 

Hegseth confesses that he knew little about any kind of classical education.  “I am a graduate of two of the most ‘prestigious’ universities in America—Princeton and Harvard—yet I’ve never read most of the classics.  Homer or Virgil, Plato or Aristotle?  I’ve read next to nothing of them in school.  I don’t know a word of Latin or Greek, let alone really understanding the histories of Rome and Greece.  I never studied Shakespeare, and don’t think I ever experienced the Socratic method (except from my one conservative professor in college).  I never had my faith infused into my education; it was always just an accessory.  I can’t properly diagram a single sentence, and couldn’t tell you the difference between a verb and an adverb.  I write like I speak.  It just is what it is.  We were all failed by our government schools, and we didn’t even know it” (p. 246).  He now believes the nation needs Classical Christian schools which stress reason and virtue, wonder and beauty, believing that, as Aristotle said, “To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on virtue.”  This means students should memorize great poetry, study history and the Bible, and become open to the “stamp of beauty, timelessness, and culture on their soul” (p. 207).  This is best done by following the time-tested trivium (grammar, logic; rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy), and obtaining a working knowledge of Latin.  Above all, the Lord Jesus Christ must be honored and heeded.  

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Pete Hegseth recently published The War on Warriors:  Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2024;  Kindle Edition), a treatise that  is “closely tied” to his “Battle for the American Mind—because if we don’t stay free, then we’re just another country with a flag.  I won’t fight for just any flag, and I hope my kids would not either” (p. xix).   This book is a very personal manifesto designed to alert readers to worrisome changes taking place in America’s armed forces.  What he says is quite worth considering but not to be taken as the final word. Though Hegseth interviewed scores of veterans and active duty warriors, his book is more a jeremiad than an objective study (though he does cite documents including a 2024 report that declared:  “‘as currently postured, the U.S. military is at significant risk of not being able to defend America’s vital national interests.’  For the second year in a row, our military is rated as ‘weak’ relative to the force needed to defend national interests)” (p. xiv).  Rather than training warriors to fight, Hegseth thinks, “We’ve become a ‘You Be You’ military” (p. xvi).  The book’s epigram sets the tone:  “Proclaim this among the nations:  Consecrate for war; stir up the mighty men.  Let all the men of war draw near; let them come up.  Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weak say, “I am a warrior” (Joel 3: 9–10; ESV).

After graduating from Princeton University and getting a cushy job in a Wall Street financial firm, Bear Stearns, Hegseth joined the Army in 2001, responding to the Islamic jihadists’ attacks on  9/11.   He became an officer and “led men in combat in Iraq in 2005.  I pulled bodies out of burning vehicles in Afghanistan in 2012.  I held a riot shield outside the White House in 2020.” (p. xi). “  Despite his years of service—and because of his conservative views expressed on Fox News—he fell afoul the Army brass and would be branded, in 2021, an “extremist!”  The fact that a few veterans were part of the January 6 occupation of the Capitol led the Biden administration to investigate “extremism” in the military, finding “only 100 cases of extremist activity among 2.1 million active and reserve forces, ‘a case rate of .005 percent’” (p. 23).  In fact, the U.S. military is the least racist, least sexist, most equitable institution in America!  The armed forces have become “woke” in part because they have followed Barack Obama’s injunction to “fundamentally transform America.”  Under Obama for eight years (plus four more under Biden), “the pipelines of future military leaders have been primed with social justice, politically correct parrots.  Parrots who love “firsts” instead of fighters.  Parrots who will spout ‘our diversity is our strength’ when they know damn well that it’s the opposite in the military:  our unity is our strength.  They are dangerous idiots, and they are in charge” (p. 29).  In Hegseth’s view:  “You don’t ‘fundamentally transform’ something or someone you love; you transform something you disdain” (p. xvi).

Because the military has lost its way there’s a recruiting crisis in America.  Though three-fourths of American youth can’t qualify for military service—largely because they’re not physically fit—the recruitment problem is largely a morale issue.  Good soldiers, fed up with identity politics, are leaving and their replacements cannot be found.  Leftists have infiltrated and now control the upper echelons of the armed services, turning them into social justice bureaucracies providing employment opportunities for various minority groups.  Presiding over the system are the general officers who covet promotions rather than leading disciplined bands of warriors. Such officers know how to cultivate powerful politicians but fail to to endear themselves to enlisted men. “Hunting for racism, today’s generals create racial strife.  Pushing for gender equality, today’s generals weaken unit readiness.  Rooting out ‘extremism,’ today’s generals push rank-and-file patriots out of their formations (I’m one of them)” (p. 10).  An “unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington” (p. 11).  By focusing on internal DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) issues our military forces have compromised their fighting ability.  A Special Forces officer—one of the “dozens and dozens” he interviewed—told Hegseth:  “‘The current state of the military is careerism.  It no longer centers on our core task:  to win wars.  Indeed, the ethos is:  Where’s my next command?  How am I going to advance myself?’” (p. 37).   While Joe Biden was Commander in Chief, careerist ‘generals “have ceded ground—or outright defeat—on every contested battlespace with a foreign adversary.” (p. 36).  

Much that’s wrong with today’s armed forces can be traced to their “(Deadly) Obsession with Women Warriors.”  Hegseth makes a “politically incorrect but . . . perfectly commonsensical observation:  Dads push us to take risks.  Moms put the training wheels on our bikes.  We need moms.  But not in the military, especially in combat units” (p. 66).  Though individual women may be amazing “warriors” they are definitely exceptions.  There’s a simple explanation for this—an “average man’s upper-body strength is greater than that of 99 percent of women” (p. 73).  Facing this reality, the military has either  lowered its standards to make sure women could qualify or established different standards for the two sexes.  For example:  “the minimum standard of push-ups for a female in the Army, age twenty-two to twenty-six, is eleven” (p. 84).  Women get preferential treatment in order to place them in combat units—including the Army Ranger and Marine infantry units.  So the Army’s Airborne School no longer requires a daily five-miles run and now busses students to jump sites since too many women were getting injured.  Basically, “physical standards have gone completely out the window” because “women really struggle on the most basic tasks.” Our “warriors” are getting “fatter and slower”  (p. 87).  

Hegseth’s also worried about the state of our military academies.  Over the years, and for various reasons, they changed as an increasing number of “civilian professors” were hired—“for reasons of ‘diversity’”—and “with them came the predictable, radical, left-wing educational philosophies” (p. 210).  Thus “LTG Darryl Williams, then the superintendent at West Point, released a five-year plan that focused on ‘inclusivity’ as equal in importance as marksmanship under fire” (p. 215).  We now have rules of engagement written for warriors by lawyers, special treatment for homosexuals and transexuals, and a Supreme Court justice (Elena Sagan) renowned for her anti-military views.  

“America today is in a cold civil war.  Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals” who “wish to erode our institutions by making us question our purpose.  They seek to make us believe that everything we have is somehow taken from other people’s efforts, other people’s possessions. Stolen land! Patriarchy!  Racism!  . . . . That America is not that great; was never great.  And, for the purposes of this book, that the US military is a tool for conquest, imperialism, and oppression” (p. 205).  To awaken us to this threat—and to enlist us in resisting it—makes The War on Warriors worth heeding. 

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All I know about sailing I learned by reading Rick Kennedy’s latest book, Winds of Santa Ana:  Pilgrim Stories of the California Bight (Eugene, OR:  Wipf & Stock, c. 2022).  But I learned much more than how to steer a boat, for the book is a wide-ranging meditation on history and theology and what it means to be a thoughtful Christian.  I first read it as a manuscript worthy of scholarly attention.  My second reading was devotional, perusing short sections each day to meditate and pray.  As Donald Yerxa says:  “Kennedy is not only a gifted academic historian, he is also a pilgrim-sailor with the head of a philosopher, the heart of a Christian mysticism and the soul of a poet.  These traits are wonderfully on display in this imaginative and enchanting book. . . .  Winds of Santa Ana nurtures the spiritual imagination.  It is a book for those longing for a thicker description of nature, the past, and life than the reductive methodologies of the modern academy offer.”   

The California “Bight” is the California coast extending from San Diego north to Santa Barbara.  “The cartography and collective histories of this coast and the islands it embraces point to a unifying character, a cultural identity, and underlying ecology.”  Knowing it intimately, Kennedy says:  “It is hard to be an atheist here.  Notions of purposeless have to struggle in a place so beautiful.  The California Bight is distinctly revelatory, sacramental, and hopeful” (p. 1).  Reared in California (admitting that while he lives in San Diego where he teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University “Santa Barbara has my heart”),   Kennedy loves the Bight and named the sailboat he acquired in 1979 “Pilgrim.”  Early on he loved to sail off the coast of Santa Barbara and he “spontaneously and willingly accepted my position in the world.  I am a child of this coast, these islands, and these waters.  The Mexican Californios called themselves Los Hijos del Pais, Children of this place.  Sailing across the Santa Barbara Channel I embraced my home.  I am a child of this coast and these islands, Un Nino de la Costa y las Islas” (p. 115).  

At the same time he read two of St Bonaventure’s works—The Life of Saint Francis and The Soul’s Journey into God.  These 13th century classics became for him “a pilgrim manual for life in general and sailing in particular” (p. 3).  (Years later he acquired a bigger boat and named it Boethius, signaling his love for the author of The Consolation of Philosophy, who “understood the Creator as the whole fullness of boundless life” (p. 37).  Reading St. Bonaventure (the patron saint of Ventura, CA) and “sailing in the Santa Barbara Channel, I found myself becoming a type of Protestant-evangelical-Franciscan-pilgrim-sailor-ecologist” (p. 3).  With Bonaventure he thinks:  “Every creature is by its nature a kind of effigy and likeness of the eternal wisdom.”  So carefully observing and pondering the natural world enables him to consider what it all ultimately points to, what it reveals about God and man.  Still more:  the art of sailing is an “intricate craft that entangles persons, boat, wind, water and sky in ways that reveal there are no sharp distinctions between the physical and spiritual, the visible and invisible” (p. 8).  

Sailing along the California Bight brings one face-to-face with the reality that it “is a wilderness only superficially civilized.  The whole of sailing, if one is willing to accept it, is a wild conversation with creation, and through creation with the Creator.  I like sailing alone, but as a pilgrim-sailor on Boethius, I never feel alone when sailing” (p. 18).  He sails expecting to hear from the birds and fish, the details of the coast, the shifts in the wind, and the history of the place.  “Sailing is an obedience-skill.  The goal is not to triumph over the elements.  The goal is to find one’s proper place within them.”  Accordingly:  “Wisdom is not marching to one’s own drummer.   Wisdom senses when to submit and when to assert, when to be passive and when to act, when to add on sails and when to shorten, reef, and hunker down.”  Importantly:  “There is no sailing ‘my own way.’  There is only submission to the music of the spheres” (p. 83).  

While sailing along the coast Kennedy ponders the significant role religion has played in Southern California.  He writes warmly of the Catholic missions—this is a “crusader coast” and her residents are inevitably “entangled in Spain’s best sense of itself as a missionary empire,” and the chain of Spanish missions established by Father Junipero Serra have left important vestiges of Catholicism along the coast.  Various Protestant churches have also flourished therein.  More than a century ago Fundamentalists such as Lyman Stuart laid the foundations for both the Fundamentalist movement and what ultimately became Biola University.  The Evangelicalism that emerged following WWII was deeply influenced by Fuller Seminary, and Campus Crusade got its start in a Sunday school class in Hollywood Presbyterian Church.  Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel helped inspire the “Jesus People” who shaped a whole generation of young believers in the 1970s.  Deeply read in Church history, Kennedy finds much to praise in the movements rooted in the California Bight.  In fact:  “To live on the California Bight is to be constantly evangelized.  Christian history, patron saints, stories of signs and wonders surround us” (p. 87).  Still more:  “That the Southern California coast seems to have an outsized role in the global history of the twentieth-century Christianity fascinates me” (p. 180).  

Winds of Santa Ana is a deeply personal, profound work, rooted in the importance of Testimony.  It’s also an illustration of a gifted historian’s concern to get at the Truth of history where autobiography and historical analysis intersect.  In the words of a mutual friend, Kay Harkins:  “To sail into the waters of Rick Kennedy’s memoir, Winds of Santa Ana, is to voyage with a most affable, engaging captain.  Part philosopher, part sage, part poet, Kennedy approaches his audience as a friend in his invitation to apprehend rich interior and exterior seas and landscapes.”  

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Whereas Rick Kennedy recently pondered historical and philosophical issues evident to him while sailing in Winds of Santa Ana, he’d earlier found equally valuable lessons while mountain climbing. In Jesus, History, and Mt. Darwin: An Academic Excursion (Eugene, Oregon: WIPF & STOCK, c. 2008)—which I re-read while preparing this review—he invited readers to join him in thinking about the disciplines of history and theology while hiking in California’s Sierra Nevadas.  The book is by design a very personal account:  “Back in the 1970s, I learned to love university life.  I eventually became a professor of history.  I started out a Bible-trusting Christian and have not lost my faith.  This book is about the reasonableness of biblical Christianity in universities.  By reasonableness, I mean the warranted credibility, if not the persuasiveness, of Christian claims about ancient history” (p. 1).                                                              In  the mountains Kennedy sought to differentiate “natural history” from the “ancient history” Herodotus and Thucydides pursued.  Too often “natural history,” following the lead of Charles Darwin, has disdained biblical accounts, inferring that since “the creation of new species did not need God, then it is best to assume that God was not involved” (p. 1).  Darwin’s theory may very well illuminate certain aspects of natural history, but it should never displace Christian history, for there’s “a sharp, ineradicable difference between studying pre-historical rocks and human history preserved in documents.”  Throughout his distinguished career Kennedy has sought the proper way to research and reason, to think and write and teach history—especially as it comes to bear on the Christian Tradition.  In fact:  “For Christianity, history is primal” (p. 1).  Relying on history as a way to understand important truths leads us to Aristotle, who insisted we learn about the past from witnesses just as truly as we learn biology by examining specimens in laboratories.  “For Aristotle, jurisprudence and history were awkward disciplines that depended on listening to and reading outside sources” (p. 31).  His views on this were set forth in his “Topics.  This tool in the Aristotelian pocketknife is crucial for Christianity’s place in modern universities and was part of Aristotelian thinking most used by New Testament authors—especially Luke and Paul” (p. 32).  Kennedy shares John Henry Newman’s view:  “Is not the being of a God reported to us by testimony, handed down  by history, inferred by an inductive process, brought home to us by metaphysical necessity, urged on us by the suggestions of our conscience?”                                                                                                Above all historians listen!  They’re not novelists or politicians interested in imagining how things might be.  They’re not mathematicians, following the logic of their intuitions.  Historians must try to see what’s written in documents, listening to testimonies concerning what happened in days gone by.  “Jesus, in Luke 8:18, told his disciples to “consider carefully how you listen.”  He wasn’t endorsing skepticism as did Descartes, looking for reasons to doubt what’s written.  He, like Aristotle, “believed truth is stronger than error” and that it carries with it a certain persuasive quality.  “Truth is not beyond human nature,” he said,  “and men do, for the most part, achieve it.”  We rightly believe what we hear when it’s reasonable, not when it’s beyond disproof.  We rightly believe things actually happened because trustworthy witnesses say so.  “In practice, historians have to trust more than doubt.  In practice, historians, especially ancient historians, can’t rely on doubting.  Historians have to be close listeners” (p. 68).                                             This means Christian historians must acknowledge they don’t have “the knife-blade precision of controlled, repeatable experiments or the screwdriver leverage of geometrical demonstrations.  By the high standards of scientific precision or by high  standards of philosophy, we don’t ‘know’ historical people—be they Jesus or Caesar Augustus—really.  However, by the practical standards of history, we know about Jesus as much, probably more, than we know about most ancient people, even Caesar Augustus” (p. 69).  Too many “biblical” scholars, seeking to locate the “historical Jesus,” end up creating a Jesus who looks very much like themselves!  That’s because they lack the humility to actually listen to Him as revealed in New Testament documents.  They fail to live up to the dictum of Cicero, who insisted historians must, above all, tell the truth.  “For Cicero and Roman education in general, the historian is rooted in reported facts, actual chronology, real geography.  The historian is not a novelist, is not even a public-policy advocate.  The historian is a truth-teller whose speech is plain and purpose clear” (p. 77).                   Christians are blessed to have truth-telling historians in Church history who give them good reason to trust the New Testament.  Consider Eusebius, the first great historian who wrote The History of the Church in the 4th century.  “Historians of ancient Rome are still amazed by the breadth and quality of Eusebius’ analysis of ancient texts and collation of ancient chronology.  Eusebius relied on primary sources such as Polycarp, who in the 2d century testified that he “was not only instructed by apostles” but also talked with “many who had seen the Lord.”  Eusebius was one of the great scholars in the Roman Empire:  a Christian who ‘regarded the Bible as key to a correct understanding of human history’” (p. 80).   A few decades later Clement of Alexander talked with and took notes of what old men remembered, preserving “the true tradition of the blessed teaching straight from Peter, James, John, and Paul, the holy apostle, son receiving it from father.”  He and other scholars persuade Kennedy that “Our Bible is strong.  It is probably the most scholarly cared-for collection of texts to come to us from the Roman Empire” (p. 80).                       

In an interesting aside, Kennedy cites sentences from Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow wherein an elderly man said:  “History grows shorter.  I remember old men who remembered the Civil War.  I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old.  It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ.  Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light of the manger at Bethlehem.  So few remembers could sit down together in a small room.”  Eyewitnesses record what they saw.  Their accounts are considered trustworthy and are passed down through the generations.  There is every reasons to believe rather than distrust them.  So Kennedy concludes:  “A good and true story can be easily carried over hundreds of years by just a few people who want to tell a true story.”  Reports of miracles—and the absolutely essential miracles for Christians, the Resurrection—merit initial belief rather than skepticism.   Reasonable folks can rest easy when taking as true what has been “delivered to the saints.”            

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The importance of Testimony that underlies Rick Kennedy’s very personal, meditative works (Winds of Santa Ana and Jesus, History, and Mt. Darwin), was set forth in a thoroughly scholarly work entitled A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, c. 2004).   He considered “the deep traditional issues of testimony and authority in the art of reasoning” and segued into a discussion of their historical development.  To rightly reason on the basis of testimony and authority is no minor matter!  From Aristotle on, thinkers and teachers concerned with education took seriously the role of testimony and authority.  And inasmuch as Aristotle set forth many important definitions and distinctions in his Topics, we may take him as “The Philosopher” standing at the heart of the “classical tradition” so central to Western Civilization.                                                                             There’s a marked difference between what we “know from within ourselves and what we learn from others” (p. 13).  Gifted children quickly become proficient in mathematics, seeing clearly what simply must be true.  An adolescent can become a world-class mathematician or chess master, but few would want him to be the nation’s president!  That’s because the things we learn from others, such as history and wisdom, must develop throughout a life rightly lived and are learned through dialectic and rhetoric rather than logic and geometry.  “Aristotle ingeniously created an intellectual device that served this and other purposes. He called it topics” and it became basic to “the liberal arts curriculum for two thousand years” (p. 13).  Much that we learn, Aristotle insisted, comes from others by way of testimony and authority.  It is a form of “social” knowledge and is essential for “social” creatures such as ourselves.  Throughout the past, a multitude of thoughtful human beings have discovered truths regarding God, man, and the cosmos that we can quickly appropriate by believing them, accepting their authority.  He advocated the “a pattern of writing about testimony from the perspective of honest people giving and receiving the best information available to them” (p. 16).   Influential educators (especially Cicero and Quintilian in ancient Rome) simplified, synthesized and prescribed the principles set forth in Aristotle’s Topics.  Then Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus, preserved this tradition of carefully evaluating and trusting testimony and authority; their works were used in schools throughout the Middle Ages.  During the Reformation, Luther’s close associate Philipp Melanchthon “reached deeply into the works of Aristotle, Augustine, and the best Medieval theologians in order to strengthen not only the role of dialectic as the foundation to all aspects of the liberal arts curriculum but also as the foundation of  Christian reasonableness in general” (p. 117).                                                                                                   Things changed, however, when 17th century thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes charted new methodologies more amenable to the budding scientific approach that was concisely summed up in the newly-established Royal Society’s motto, “Nullius in verba” (On no one’s word).  Bacon specifically sought to dismiss Aristotle’s “common sense” philosophy, and Descartes endeavored to confine all knowledge to mathematical strictures.  Thus Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (along with Newton a co-founder of calculus) could imagine settling “all disputes” through “computation” (p. 197). In the hands of David Hume, this approach easily led to the denial of most all testimony—especially when applied to miracles.  Important textbooks, notably The Port-Royal Logic, certainly tried to maintain a balance between truths discerned mathematically and truths delivered through historical witnesses.  And gifted disciples of Aristotle, such as John Henry Newman, eloquently upheld his views and emphasized “the reasonableness of Christianity.” But during the past four centuries the measured rejection of Aristotle’s Topics is quite evident.  Consequently, C.S. Lewis’s lament in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (“Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”) describes the plight of modern education. Philosophers following Immanuel Kant reduced knowledge to what can be subjectively discerned. The autonomous self stands alone, determining what is true, or good, or beautiful. In America, John Dewey insisted one learns singularly through personal experience, through “doing.” Reflecting the influence of such thinkers, today’s teachers promote “Critical Thinking,” encouraging even the youngest scholars to stand defiantly alone and decide for themselves what is true or good or beautiful for them. Rarely are they taught to trust authorities or historical testimonies or “common sense” traditions.                         In the book’s final paragraphs Professor Kennedy reflects on his own intellectual pilgrimage.  Growing up in California in the 1960s, he embraced the bumper sticker philosophy: “Question Authority.”  Throughout his many years in school, culminating in his doctoral studies, he was urged to become an independent, “critical” thinker. Historians, he learned, were to be ever-vigilant, doubting rather than trusting sources, of “good teachers who modeled what they did not preach” (p. 310).  So he began to appreciate the wisdom of pre-modern thinkers such as Aristotle and Augustine.                                                                                           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *                                                Marvin Olasky, for nearly 30 years the editor of World magazine, offers us an instructive testimony in Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir . (Phillipsburg, N.J.:  P&R Publishing. Kindle Edition, c. 2024).  Reared in a nominally Jewish home, he rejected religion  soon after his his bar mitzvah and considered himself an atheist while in high school, where he found himself enthralled with journalism.  Off to Yale for undergraduate study, he wrote for the campus newspaper and joined like-minded rebels protesting the Vietnam War.  Having tread Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, he first aligned himself with leftists and ultimately  made “the worst decision of my life,” joining the Communist Party USA.  After various adventures and a failed marriage, Olasky decided to study for a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan before pursuing further journalistic goals.                                            

But unexpectedly, everything changed!  “Suddenly, without warning, on an ordinary day, figment becomes fact.  New thoughts bombard my brain:  What if Lenin is wrong?  Why am I sure that God does not exist?  Why have I turned my back on him? . . . .  For eight hours I sit in that chair, unwilling to move.  Every hour brings a glance at the clock and surprise that I am still stationary.  It’s hard for me to convey the strangeness, the otherness, of this experience.  No drugs, no dreams, just sitting in the chair, hour after hour, suddenly thinking Marxism is wrong.  At three o’clock I’m an atheist and a Communist.  At eleven p.m. I’m a believer in a God of some kind.  Hardly born again, but no longer dying.  At eleven, finally, I stand up, go outside, and wander around the cold and dark campus for the next two hours, trying to make sense of those eight hours.  . . . .   Years later I read in the Westminster Confession of Faith that God ‘is pleased, in His appointed and accepted time, effectually to call [some] by his Word and Spirit out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ” (pp. 52-53).                                                                                               

In time, Olasky and his wife Susan moved to Texas, where he has taught journalism at the University of Texas, becoming a tenured professor in 1987.  They and their children are active in a local church and work together supporting pro-life endeavors.  He also wrote “a book, Prodigal Press, that begins a long march to reform journalism.  I see opportunity for a middle road between an ‘objectivity’ that pretends neither God nor natural law exists and a subjectivity that exalts individual opinion and deduction over facts on the ground and induction” (p. 77).  His opportunity to implement his philosophy came when he became editor of World, endeavoring to bring a Christian perspective to the news.  He also wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion, arguing that churches do a better job in caring for the needy than the government.  This brought him to the attention George W. Bush, who asked him to serve as an ill-fated advisor in his administration.  Looking back, Olasky’s profoundly “grateful that God exists and Christ’s resurrection is a reality that provides hope as death approaches” (p. 160).  Readable and worth reading!

  Michael Phillips is a Christian novelist who recently published Endangered Virtues and the Coming Ideological War: A Challenge for Americans to Reclaim the Historic Virtues of the Nation’s Christian Roots (Sterling VA:  Fidelis Publishing, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  ”Rapid changes” around the world deeply concern him.  The culture war is very real and its outcome “will determine our future and that of generations to come” (p. 10).  It looks much too much like the pre-Civil War 1850s, when it was still a  war of words rather than shells and bayonets.  Today’s combatants are traditional Christians who are assailed by cultural and political progressives ruthlessly determined to destroy them.  We need “to be wise thinkers to properly absorb and respond intelligently to the important idea-crisis that is overtaking us.  We cannot take ideas haphazardly as they come, catching them, as the late . . . Francis Schaeffer once said, like measles.  We have to be aware of how we think, aware of our presuppositions and worldviews, and the implications of both.  Too much is at stake to be sloppy thinkers” (p. 11).  As Christians we need to be ever perceptive, discerning the spiritual dimensions to the cultural conflicts we face.  Unfortunately Phillips identifies the problem without providing much help resolving it, other than living godly lives.  To better grasp what’s needed requires a more adept, and well-grounded, thinker, Alistair McIntyre.  

   When I began teaching Ethics fifty years ago I used textbooks that addressed various issues by contrasting positions and encouraging students to analyze and formulate their own views.  The professor’s task was to clearly explain what a variety of philosophers thought while allowing students to freely pick and choose the views they preferred.  Then came Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue:  A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame Press, c. 1981)!  Reading this book changed my approach to the course and led me to make Aristotle’s Ethics the basic text used every semester, supplemented by more modern (and more popular) readings.  “Simply put,” McIntyre said, “the moral life aims at virtue” (p. ix), and he sought to determine how we become ethical persons rather than asking how to answer ethical questions.  Along with Josef Pieper, he upheld the “older view which held that our intellects are not to be creative but to be conformed to the truth of things—and that such conformity is increasingly possible only as we grow in virtue” (p. 23).

This is no purely “academic” question!  The fate of the world, the well-being of mankind, rests in the balance.  For we live in troubled times.  Indeed, MacIntyre suspected we face the kind of disintegrating culture historians describe in the centuries which marked the transition from the Ancient to the Medieval World, an era of “barbarism and darkness” (p. 263).  Today “the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us from quite some time” (p. 263). He tried to show how our modern (Enlightenment-shaped) culture has lost its moral integrity, collapsing into the emotivist ethics widely evident in the West.  When school children are taught—in “values clarification” sessions—to decide what’s right, on a case-by-case basis in accordance with their feelings, emotivism reigns.  It’s as deeply rooted in our culture as PC and TV.  Since different folks have different feelings our culture lacks any ethical coherence, any rational rationale or objective standards.

Emotivists believe that saying “this is good” merely means “I approve of this and want you to feel likewise.”  So relativism reigns and everyone makes up his own rules.  Autonomous individuals insist on it.  Every man is his own ethicist–as well as his own historian, theologian, etc.  Thus:  ‘Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case” (p. 68).  Friedrich Nietzsche’s celebration of the “will-to-power”–the “might-makes-right” ethics of unhampered autonomy—represents the final gasp of an Enlightenment-nurtured “morality” turned “immoral.”  A moment’s thought reveals the inevitable chaos concealed in such views, but Nietzsche discarded reason as well as morality, so we believe lies as well as behave immorally.

But not so fast said MacIntyre!  There is an ancient and eminently defensible ethical philosophy with roots in Aristotle and Aquinas.  To doubt Nietzsche, to oppose the drift of his antinomian ethics, forces one to examine the tradition Nietzsche (and the Enlightenment) rejected:  Aristotle.  To MacIntyre there are only two options:  Nietzsche or Aristotle!  “For if Aristotle’s position in ethics and politics—or something very like it—could be sustained, the whole Nietzschean enterprise would be pointless.  This is because the power of Nietzsche’s position depends upon the truth of one central thesis:  that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will” (p. 117).

    This leads MacIntyre to argue on behalf of Aristotle, whose ethical ideas have thrived through the centuries in Greek, Muslim, Jewish and Medieval Christian circles.  Each of these cultures rooted the virtues in “a cosmic order which dictates the place of each virtue in a total harmonious scheme of human life.  Truth in the moral sphere consists in the conformity of moral judgment to the order of this scheme” (p. 142).  Aristotle represents a “pre-modern” way of thinking, but in fact he may be the wisest guide through the tar pits of what many call “post-modernism.”   To Aristotle, “Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways.  To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues” (p. 149).  A good man doesn’t “follow the rules” but becomes the kind of rightly-educated person who habitually, naturally does what is right.  

     Just as we learn to play the piano or throw a baseball by working with a teacher, so we learn to act ethically through discipline, instruction, habit.  Thus:  “A Virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods” (p. 191).  We learn about the virtues primarily through stories.  Children need to hear stories which praise good and condemn evil.  We all need, to live virtuously, a steady diet of uplifting, challenging, admirable examples.  We need Bible stories, King Arthur stories, Jane Austin stories, C.S. Lewis stories.  The stories we tell, the songs we sing, the heroes we acclaim, the villains we despise, fundamentally shape our ethics.  

     MacIntyre’s After Virtue rewards reading and re-reading.  It provides the reader with many penetrating insights into the essence of “modernity” and some powerful suggestions as to the course we should take if we care for the welfare of coming generations.

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        John H. Garvey served as president of The Catholic University of America from 2011 until 2022.  Earlier he served as dean of Boston College Law School after teaching law at the University of Notre Dame.  Throughout his distinguished career at all these institutions he was constantly concerned with moral formation in the educational and legal world and routinely devoted his commencement remarks to the importance of the classical virtues.  He recently compiled his addresses in The Virtues (Washington, D.C.:  The Catholic University Press, c. 2022).  He begins by citing a review of Thomas Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons in The New York Times,noting that Wolfe had “located one of the paradoxes of the age.  Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building . . . they find themselves in a world of unprecedented ambiguity . . . where it’s not clear if anything can be said to be absolutely true.”

Garvey gave the speeches and wrote this book to say yes, some things are absolutely true and should give you guidance throughout your life.  Unfortunately, the history of Harvard reveals a different trajectory.  Chartered in 1636, over the centuries Harvard had three mottos:  Veritas (“Truth”); In Christi Gloria (“for the glory of Christ”); and Christo et Ecclesiae (“for Christ and Church”).  But Harvard has changed.  Christ is no longer honored, nor is any truth considered absolute.  Harvard and other universities certainly provide a moral education, but it’s a libertine celebration of individual freedom to do whatever one feels.  And, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, students mainly “want to be amused.”  Thus, in the infamous words of the late Supreme Court Justice Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:  “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of they mystery of human life.”  On the other hand, John Paul II insisted real freedom is not casting off  restraints but doing what’s right.  So Garvey says:  “The virtues are habits that channel our freedom in the direction we ought to go.  They are principles of action that move us to do good things.  ‘Only virtuous people are capable of freedom, Ben Franklin says” (p. 15).  And virtuous people become so by forming good habits, developing a “second nature” that enables them to almost instinctively.  Just as we develop the ability to play the cello  through painstaking practice, so we develop our moral character through  the disciplined doing of right things.

As a Christian, Garvey begins by focusing on the “theological virtues” basic to the Faith.  By grace, believers are given the faith, hope, and love needed to partially restore what was lost in the Garden of Eden.  We do not manufacture them—they come to us from another realm of reality.  Faith enables us to believe in God’s revelation.  Faith is  never blind—it actually “enlarges our field of vision” to include invisible realms of reality.  It enables us to grasp and cling to God’s Word.  Just as I believe in the theory of relativity because Einstein demonstrated its truth (not because I understand it) so too I take God at His Word because I trust Him.  Hope places our ultimate joy in heaven alone.  It “is the virtue that connects our desire for heaven with God’s promises.  It links our deepest longing for happiness with God” (p. 45).  Love (or charity), the finest of all the virtues, puts God first and enables us live out the Gospel.  “These three virtues are the heart of the Christian life.”  They bring a bit of heaven into our daily lives.  

Conjoined with the theological virtues are the “cardinal” virtues routinely cited by Plato, Ambrose and Aquinas:  Fortitude; Justice; Temperance; Prudence.  They are acquired by human effort though they certainly need God’s sustaining grace to develop.  First and most important is Prudence, the foundation of the other virtues.  It finds wise ways to get to the right end.  Given what seems to be a necessary choice between two apparent goods, prudence prescribes the best one.  At times it seems as if we must choose the “lesser of two evils,” and prudence helps us weigh the options and do what’s best in the situation.  We need to know ourselves, with all our strengths and weaknesses, so we need prudence to discern how to think and act well.  As the great novelist Flannery O’Connor once said:  “The older I get the more respect I have for Old Prudence.”  Justice assumes Cicero’s declaration:  Non nobis solum nati humus (“We are not born for ourselves alone”).  We live a common life and need to rightly interact with others.  Doing justice means giving others what is due them.  Cicero insisted we do so only as we see justice as doing the will of God in our world.  To do so requires Courage or Fortitude.  It’s on display in heroic figures such as Joan of Arc and George Washington.  But it’s equally present in parents getting out of bed and going to work every day to support their families.  For most of us courage emerges in small ways—just getting doing what’s needed at home and in church, telling the truth, treating others kindly.  Tearing down things requires little fortitude, but building up institutions or persons really does.   Temperance, said St. Benedict, requires “moderation in all things.”  It’s not a headline-grabbing virtue but it really matters when living a good life.  It’s important, rather paradoxically in a culture committed to being amused, because it enables us to really enjoy the good things in life.  As Fulton Sheen said:  “happiness comes from self-possession through temperance, not from self-expression through license.”  

In addition to the supernatural and cardinal virtues, Garvey reminds us there are other “little virtues” worth commending.  St. Thomas Aquinas said the “entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained towards God as its end, inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the Divine goodness to the glory of God.”  Nothing is so small that if fails to celebrate God’s Being and Goodness.  So practicing the “little” virtues are ways to glorify and worship God.  Small traits such as “gentleness, modesty, and humility are ‘graces which ought to color everything we do,’” said St Francis de Sales.  So Aristotle praised wittiness and liberality, Ben Franklin touted cleanliness, and constancy loomed large in Jane Austen’s fictional universe.  There are appropriate virtues for individual callings and stages of life.  

Consequently, Garvey considers some of the virtues most needed by younger folks who, John Paul II said, deeply desire for truth.  They want to know what makes life meaningful, what gives one purpose and direction.  They want to know what career to follow, what person to marry, what worldview is worthwhile.  Youngsters easily substitute enthusiasm for wisdom, making horrendous mistakes.  But there’s much to praise in enthusiasm and the willingness to commit to high ideals and social change.  What they need is to “cultivate:  docility, humility, honesty, industriousness, studiousness, modesty, and silence” (p. 95).  Reading these brief sections, imagining how the students Garvey addressed might have responded, makes for enjoyable reflections.  

Docility means to be teachable.  Contrary to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” derived from Freud and Nietzsche, docility encourages listening (especially to the elderly and the witness of tradition).  Said Aristotle:  “we ought to attend to the . . . saying and opinions of experienced and older people; because experience has given them an eye to see aright.”  Consequently:  “We call the University our ‘alma mater’ (our nourishing mother) because we trust that our professors are feeding us the truth.  We call the Church our Mother for similar reasons” (p. 105).  Humility allows us to rightly appraise ourselves, above all acknowledging God as Creator, imploring His aid in the many areas it’s needed.  Honesty, Garvey says, evaluating lawyers, is one of the two things that make good ones—trials and the judicial system ought to discover and uphold truth, dispassionately and without favoritism.  Modesty may apply to dress or comportment, but it’s essentially behaving appropriately, not making a spectacle of yourself.  

Industriousness makes good use of your time, investing your life in healthy and worthwhile things.  Studiousness “moderates our natural desire to know,” keeping from unwise excesses.  Silence tempers the tongue!  So it’s the kind of temperance and recommended by Ben Franklin as the second of his thirteen virtues.  “Speak not what may benefit others or yourself; Avoid trifling Conversation.”  

Turning to Middle Age, Garvey notes this is the time when we do most of our life’s work and shoulder major responsibilities, including marriage and family as well as occupations.  It’s a strenuous time but potentially packed with joy and satisfaction.  What we need in these years are truthfulness, patience, generosity, meekness, constant, and hospitality.   “Above all,” wrote Dostoyevsky, “don’t lie to yourself.”  Tell the truth.  Don’t “live by lies.”  Basically, “Patience waits for the right means to do what is good.”  Off-the-cuff remarks (or emails), thoughtless actions, premature judgments all reveal a lack of patience.  Generosity means not “random acts of kindness” but thoughtful, loving things done for another person’s well-being.  Meekness enables us to restrain anger and keep control of our passions.  Constancy keeps us at our post, even when it’s not pleasurable.  Hospitality, evident in Mary and Jesus at the marriage in Cana, “creates the circumstances for the social dimension of love to flourish” (p. 144), and will be perfectly on display in heaven!  

Considering Old Age, Garvey thinks it has important purposes and requires significant virtues.  It’s a time for Repentance, coming to terms with failures early in life.  Speaking for himself, he says:  “I have learned that repentance is the duct tape of family life.  It can fix anything” (p. 152).  How many parents and children could be reconciled if only they repented!  Gratitude distinguishes happy old people!  It’s not an emotion evoked by passing celebrations, but a constant doxology—“praise God from whom all blessings flow.”  And Mercy, both accepted and given, ought to mark old age.  It’s a “grandparent’s virtue.”  Magnanimity enables the elderly to give, at times lavishly—and many of them have at last the means to do so.  Gentleness is much needed in a world filled with conflict and tension.  It’s a kind of charity that softens the blows and eases the sorrows of a fallen world.  Benignity (not a familiar word to many of us but meaning kindness) may well be uniquely evident in the elderly.  

Finishing his admonitions to virtue, Garvey praises Wisdom (one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit), Peace (primarily peace of soul), and Joy (a lasting satisfaction, unlike passing pleasures).  Above all, “try to find God in all things.”  The Virtues contains much to be praised—many illustrations and eminently comprehensible injunctions, all rooted in the great virtue tradition in ethics.  Would all universities in America had men such as Garvey leading them!

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Years ago I attended a scholarly conference and shared a dinner table with a young theologian, Matthew Levering.  In subsequent years he has published a number of scholarly works and joined an elite corps of gifted Christian thinkers.  Recently he published Dying and the Virtues (Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, c. 2018).  The great Church historian Jaroslav Pelican once said:  “The core of Christian faith is pessimism about life and optimism about God, and therefore hope for life in God.”  How well we have lived certainly becomes manifest in our hour of death.  So, the author asks:  “What would it look like for a dying persons to have been ‘hid with Christ in God’ and to ‘blossom’ on Christ’s grave?  My answer involves what I call the virtues of dying” (p. 4).  These virtues, he says, are “given by God” and totally dependent upon Him.  He believes “these virtues exhibit that ‘it is only the cross of Christ that makes ultimate sense of human death, without which dying would be merely ‘the great wrecking ball that destroys everything’” (p. 5).  

Beginning with the “most excellent” of the virtues— Love—Levering cites Joseph Ratzinger:  “‘man’s longing for survival’ has its roots in ‘the experience of love,’ in which love wills eternity for the beloved and therefore for itself’” (p. 13).  Having loved—and lost a loved one—almost automatically prompts one to hope for life everlasting wherein love endures.  Musing on this leads the author to ponder the message of Job, who “repeatedly returns to the question of whether God intends to annihilate him” (p. 15).  In the end Job finds assurance in the goodness of his Maker and the confidence that inasmuch as his Redeemer lives forever so shall he!  When we love we long for more time with our beloved.  Thus the virtue of Hope rightly focuses on eternal life.  Generally speaking, people who pathologically fear death have no hope for life after death.  But Christians who have (as St Paul prescribed) died to the world and come alive in Christ face death peacefully.  The third of the supernatural virtues is Faith, the confidence that God is and will do what He said.  We who have walked by faith will pass through death’s valley relying on the One who designed and sustained us.  We’ve learned to “let go and let God” do His perfect will, enabling Him to work through us, perfecting such virtues as penitence, gratitude, solidarity, humility, surrender, and courage.  Death will be our final test, a step from mortality to immortality, from earth. Now that Jesus has arisen, we need not fear the grave.  Ultimately, says Levering,  “To understand our dying as an act of grateful living chraracterized by virtues, we need Christ” (p. 164).

Levering brings impressive erudition (35 pages of endnotes; a 27 page bibliography) and helpful illustrations to his discussion, making this a fine addition to the virtue tradition.  Not an easy read, but good things often cost us something.  

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At a very young age children ask “why”?  A youngster may ask why are there 24 hours in the day.  In response his father will say because the earth revolves open its axis while it circles around the sun.  Then the child may very well want to know “how do you know that?”  The dad will probably explain that astronomers and physicists tell us how the solar system works.  The child may not fully understand, but he certainly wants to know, for we always wonder “how do you know what you know.”  Philosophically the realm of “epistemology” deals with this question, and it’s truly something that really matters.  If you’ve never pondered why numbers of men are “self-identifying” as women and competing in women’s athletics—or why the woman coaching South Carolina’s national championship basketball team supports such activities—you might not identify this as a deeply epistemological issue, but it is.  We confront the transgender question because of philosophical developments during the modern era.  Along with the ancient sophists, modern thinkers affirm that “man is the measure of all things.”  As philosophical nominalism gained traction, science displaced theology as the “queen” of academia, deism ousted theism, and what we call the “modern world” developed.  For six centuries now, thinkers have increasingly taken universals such as truth, goodness and beauty to be mere names we humans paste, like post-it notes, on things.  “The issue ultimately involved,” says Esther Meek, “is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind.  The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses.  With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism” (p. 3). 

To overly simplify the story, in the 17th century two thinkers charted the course for our world.  Francis Bacon insisted we can only know empirical facts in the physical world and provided a handbook for the “scientific revolution” then unfolding.  He championed the “inductive” approach to knowledge.  At the same time Rene Descartes argued we can know with certainty only what’s absolutely self-evident and undeniable in our minds.  He followed an essentially deductive way of knowing.  Together they opened the way to an increasingly subjective notion of truth.  One of the best analyses of all this was set forth in Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences—published in 1948 but still remarkably prescient.  He wrote the book“as a challenge to forces that threaten the foundations of civilization,” fearing Western Civilization was collapsing under the assaults of nihilists who acknowledged no absolute truths, no permanent values.  Weaver  called this a “vertical invasion of the barbarians”—a cultural catastrophe equal to that visited upon the Ancient world by the Goths and the Vandals.  To do battle with modern barbarians Weaver sought to defend “the mind itself, and its capacity to actually know the Reality designed by a Higher Mind.”

Weaver traced this struggle back to the 14th century when nominalism began replacing realism as the dominant epistemology.  William of Occam replaced Thomas Aquinas, skepticism replaced certainty, and the decline of the West began.  “The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.”  What’s been lost is the “power of the word”—the word which aligns our minds with the Word which was (and is) God.   Weaver sought to reestablish the realism of the ancients, insisting philosophy begins not with skepticism but with wonder and that “sentiment is anterior to reason.”  Ideas and ideals, virtues and virtuous heroes, a love for one’s ancestors and descendants, a vision of the eternal good and a commitment to its acquisition, must find roots in the hearts of those who would restore our culture.  But beyond diagnosing the ills we confront Weaver proposed no way, given the scientific-industrial world we live in, to recover the wisdom of the ancients.

Enter Esther Nightcap Meek, a Christian philosopher most recently teaching at St Louis University, who finds in Michael Polanyi a thoughtful guide to help us think about thinking.  In her Contact with Reality;  Michael Polanyi’s Realism and Why It Matters (Eugene, OR:  Cascade Books, c. 2017;  Kindle Edition) she set forth her case.  “In this lively book,” says D.C. Schindler (a noted Christian professor), “Esther Lightcap Meek does more than simply make a compelling case for Polanyi’s realism in the context of dominant epistemologies and philosophies of science; she also brings out a beautiful dimension of Polanyi’s thought that is not often seen, deepening its metaphysical underpinnings through creative engagement with contemporary thinkers.  This book makes a much-needed contribution to the reception of Polanyi—and offers a fresh, new way to think about reason more generally.”  

   Many years ago I gave a lecture at my alma mater dealing with “light as a symbol of truth,” pointing out that light may appear as either a wave or a stream of particles.  So too truth may appear as a broad pattern (a field) or as individual data.  Following the lecture a physics professor chatted with me and mentioned the importance of Michael Polanyi for scientists such as himself.  Subsequently I read most of Polanyi’s works (especially his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge) and found him both fascinating and frequently persuasive.  Reading Esther Meek’s treatise renewed within me an appreciation for Polanyi’s insights.  Her book begins with his statement:  “We can account for this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell [personal knowledge] if we believe in an external reality with which we can establish contact.  This I do.  I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.” 

Michael Polanyi was a physical chemist of considerable renown whose interests turned ultimately to philosophy.  A Hungarian of Jewish descent born in 1889 to a prosperous, socially-eminent family, he interacted with the likes of Albert Einstein and sired a son (John) who won a Nobel Prize.  He gave the Gifford Lectures in Natural Religion in the early 1950s which were published as Personal Knowledge in 1958.  Though Polanyi  explored multiple fields, Meek wants to focus on his philosophical realism.  “At the heart of what Polanyi was about, especially in his stepping away from science to do philosophy, was his concern to offer a fundamentally different epistemology that, rather than undercutting science (not to mention all of Western culture)—as he felt the prevailing paradigm was doing—would save it and enhance it.”  What we label “modernity” took a skeptical approach that cut “us off from the natural trust and communion with reality that lies at the heart of humanness” (p. 5).  As an eighth-grader Meek inhaled this skepticism, thinking she could only know what resided in her own mind.  Her modernist guides sought to conquer nature rather than commune with it.  Truth was essentially subjective.  Then Postmodernism pushed this further, declaring we “construct” the world, even to the point of declaring a man is a woman!

Contrary to many 20th century epistemologists (including Esther Meek as a child), who were deeply skeptical regarding the possibility of knowing much of anything, Polanyi sought to give us ways to actually know and trust our knowing.  We can discover that our insights “ring true to what we actually do when we come to know—when we know, that is, not only in frontline scientific research and discovery, but throughout all the byways of ordinary life” (p. 3).   Our minds can actually come into correspondence with reality—we can know (as Aristotle, Aquinas, et al. insisted) what is.  Accordingly, Meek has carved out what she calls a “covenant epistemology” and “moved from child skeptic to seasoned intoxicated realist” (p. 4).  Though a Protestant in the Reformed tradition, Meek finds herself drawn to the work of the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who “has uncannily and aptly portrayed the philosophical trajectory of my life—and possibly yours.”  We all wrestle with basic questions which “keep coming back” as we “drill more deeply into the mysterious abyss of being.”  We wonder, von Balthasar says:  “Does truth in fact exist?” And that leads us to wonder even “being exists at all” (p. 8) 

Realists think things exist whether or not we think abut them.  They think we can truly know them—somewhat as an x-ray reveals what is under the skin— as we discern “essences” in what is.  Realists simply assume, without bothering to prove, that we are in a knowing relationship with the external world.  For them, we know what makes a circle a circle, a hawk a hawk, a woman a woman.  Polanyi certainly allowed for a subjective aspect to knowing—thus he emphasized personal knowledge.  But personal does not mean subjective!  In fact, Meek argues, it is simply an important component of his realism.  He also rejected “the false ideal of objectivity” entertained in the scientific community, which sometimes claims to function in in detached, mechanistic ways.  Such knowledge Polanyi labels “explicit,” and it is espoused by many scientists who want an impersonal, mathematical standard of truth.  Polanyi, however, thought to think in personal, not mechanical ways.  Indeed, he often said:  “We know more than we can tell.”  

We come to know what is through the process of discovery, discerning what we tacitly know and need to clarify.  We don’t “construct” truth—we discover things and bring our minds into correspondence with them.  Seeing something, whether a star or a snowflake, we assume it’s there and that we can truly discover things within it.  “Discovery involves the transference of information, not from one mind to another, but into the mind in the first place.  If knowledge is wholly explicit, there can be no learning, no discovery, and thus no scientific knowledge.  Discovery . . . involves the germination of new hunches and ideas and the pursuit of those hunches despite the absence of any sort of justification” (p. 21).  Such is part and parcel of the scientific method.  We can find explicit truths because we rely upon oft-unconscious tacit knowledge.  “Knowledge, therefore,” Meek says, “is objective by virtue of responsible personal involvement, explicit by virtue of its tacit root, and examinable by virtue of our foundational commitments” (p. 23).  Polanyi insisted that much of what we know is tacit rather than explicit.  “We know more than we can tell.”  We deal with—and synthesize—knowledge of particular things and comprehensive wholes.  Giving attention to the particulars cannot be severed from a deep-level awareness of their context. 

Still more:  this kind of thinking involves intuition and imagination.  Scientists probing the problems facing them as they do research frequently have sudden moments of insight, breakthrough intuitions that suddenly provide answers unavailable to computer-style computations.  As with Archimedes pondering how to discern real gold by measuring the water it displaced and then running through the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka!” many scientists confess to an almost mystical awareness of solutions to their questions.   This is a “dynamic intuition” invaluable to deep-level thought, and it “recognizes clues and somehow ‘measures the distance’ between the present understanding and the intuited focus.”   To illustrate this Polanyi noted:  “that we have all experienced it in the common attempt to remember someone’s name; we know somehow that we are close and then closer to having it; we speak of its being ‘on the tip of my tongue’” (p. 45).   

Contact with Reality was a re-working of Meek’s Ph.D. dissertation, revealing all the strengths (careful research) and weaknesses (largely inaccessible to readers not grounded in philosophy) of such works.  But the main point, evident in the title, is this:  one of the finest 20th century thinkers provides a way to take a deeply realistic approach to knowledge.

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After teaching for many years and working with others in the Polanyi Society, Esther Meek published some reader-friendly books showing why she regards Polanyi so highly.  In Longing to Know:  The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press c. 2003; Kindle Edition), she targeted “people who wrestle with questions concerning truth and the possibility of knowledge as a result our culture’s recent consensus shift from modernism to postmodernism” (p. 7).  Postmodernism is deeply skeptical, claiming all we have are “narratives” telling various stories.  We may embrace one or more of the stories, but none of them is actually true.  So we must deal with people who not only deny objective truth but deny there’s any truth at all!  Everything’s “your opinion” they say!  

In particular Meek wants to provide Christians a firm foundation for their faith.  She thinks “that many questions can be answered, at least preliminarily, and many puzzles solved, and personal hope of truth restored, by appropriating this [Polanyi-crafted] model of how we know.  I believe the model is confirmed by the ordinary day-to-day experiences of every human being” (p. 9).  Though the endeavor may be difficult—life itself, and philosophy itself, can be quite difficult!—but the knowing the truth is worth the work.  Ultimately, and above all else, she says, we can know God.  Nothing can be finer, for:  “If God is, what he is has far-reaching consequences for our lives—who we are, how we live, and what happens after death.  Perhaps the simplest way to say it is this:  If God is, and he is master of all, then he is master of you and your world.  If he isn’t, then you are.  You might see one or the other alternative as the preferable one.  But it’s impossible to be indifferent about the choice; it hits just too close to home for comfort” p. 17).  

Meek was reared in a Christian home and believed in God, but she could not suppress many questions about Him and our ability to know anything about Him.  Over the years she has worked with students just like herself—wanting to believe but unsure if there is any warrant for belief.  To know, to engage in what she calls an “episematic act,” requires much more than just taking someone’s word for something.  There’s a difference between thinking and knowing.  I may think it’s freezing outside and be wrong.  If I know it’s actually freezing there’s a certainty as to what is. “Know is a success word: when we use it we imply that we were successful at getting the truth right.  So we have thought that knowing something means that what we claim to know can’t be wrong or we cannot doubt—that it is infallible, or certain.  For knowledge to be knowledge at all, it must be infallible or certain.  Otherwise it is opinion, or belief, but not knowledge.” (p. 26).  She writes:  “My point is going to be this: If knowledge is as philosophers have thought for centuries, if our efforts to know have certainty as their uncompromising ideal, then skepticism seems the inevitable alternative.  But our lived experience witnesses powerfully that this cannot be.  So maybe we need to revise how we think about knowledge” (p. 28).  

We do actually know things, and God is truly knowable.  We cannot know everything about Him—indeed we may be able to know just a little bit about Him—but it’s still trustworthy knowledge.  We know something when we integrate scattered bits of information with a more coherent pattern.  We see a leaf, then leaves, then the tree sustaining them.  We’re capable of grasping “a coherence, an integrated pattern, a making sense of things, that opens the world to us” (p. 50).  Certainly “all truth’s someone’s truth”—there is a personal perspective to all knowing.  But to acknowledge this does not mean, by any means, that “truth is relative” or nonexistent!  To know involves “commitment, love, and faith.  But it is not subjectivistic, relativistic, privatistic—those unfortunate labels that many have thrown at faith and that many have embraced as the death of truth.  It is not subjectivistic; it is human.  It is embodied, responsible human skill” (p. 60). Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, Meek believes, delivers us from the skepticism embedded in modernity.  

Induction and deduction have their places in a theory of knowledge.  But much more is involved than collating and arranging data or following mathematical formulae.  We know things best when we deal with our world much like a detective, following clues and noticing patterns, unlocking mysterious boxes, finding traces in the creation leading us rightly.   It’s what Lewis and Clark did leading the famous expedition up the Missouri River, over the continental divide, and down the Columbia River.  They were learning as they went and discovered fascinating sites.  So too we learn “to know God” by getting “tips” from daily life.  There are momentary insights, curious coincidences, unexpected illuminations that enable us to know Him.  As an amazing “image of God” we’re bursting with information ranging from the inner workings of tiny cells to the mysterious processes of recalling long-dormant memories.  We learn to walk, type, play a piano and ultimately do so without consciously commanding actions.  Meek thinks such “bodily clues are included in our experience of God, and I don’t think of it as a mystical experience” (p. 93).  It’s one of the many ways we can come to know Him.  

This Polanyi-kind of knowing helps us immensely “when it comes to our main question—whether we can know God.  It offers hope about whether we can know anything at all.  It dissolves some of the puzzles about knowing that have plagued thinkers for centuries, puzzles generated by a faulty, unrealistic model of knowing.  And it helps us see things in fresh and exciting ways, for it aptly and evocatively fits our ordinary human experience” (p. 56).   Such knowing enables us to trust our insights into a very real world independent of ourselves.  We actually “contact” it.  More than believing our ideas “correspond” to the external world, Polanyi-kind of knowing assures us that we are truly in touch with what’s Real, including God.  

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In Loving to Know:  Introducing Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR:  Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, c. 2011; Kindle Edition), Esther Meek continued to build her case for the importance of Michael Polanyi in Christian theology.  Unlike her previous treatise, Longing to Know, this one is written for persons considering the claims of Christianity but unsure whether they can know anything at all about it.  For Meek nothing is more important than epistemology—knowing how and what we can truly know.  We’re knowers who know something about what can be known.  We deal with it all the time—only philosophers try to be more precise and provide illuminating terms to help us think well.  “‘Epistemological therapy’ is what I call my personal effort to help people reform their default epistemological settings in a way that brings health, hope, and productivity” (p. 6).

Meek’s on a mission to get people to “care about knowing.  Because not to care is to be dead. Indifference to one’s surroundings is a telltale sign of sickness, of impending death.”  Importantly:  “It is human to care.  Boredom, absence of wonder, is a sign of sickness.  If our outlook on knowledge is such that it leads to boredom, then something is amiss in our outlook on knowledge” p. 31).  We need to be attentive to our deepest inner longings, following them help us find out why we’re here, what we should do, whom we can become.  Ultimately we want to know Reality in its fullness.  To know it “calls for an attentiveness on our part that is far less like a dispassionate cataloguing of information and more like passionate indwelling of that half-hidden object of our care,”  and if  “knowing is care at its core, caring leads to knowing. To know is to love; to love will be to know” (p. 33).

To help her readers on this journey into covenant epistemology, Meek utilizes the works of Annie Dillard, Lesslie Newbigin, and Parker Palmer.  Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek helped her see a covenantal aspect of knowing.  When we join Dillard and carefully study nature we discover a wonderful world of complex creatures bestowing upon us an awareness of grace.  Newbigin stressed the importance of finding Jesus as The Truth and entering into a personal relationship with Him.  Palmer, a Christian philosopher, developed a  personalist epistemology that weds one to the Creator, finding truth within a loving relationship with Him.  Within such a relationship—not standing apart and asking abstract questions—enables us to actually know Ultimate Reality.  Doing so brings great joy, the joy of discovering what we most deeply desire to know.  So we both give ourselves to and invite what’s Real to join us in discovering what’s of ultimate concern.  To our delight we find that the Real is most profoundly personal.  He’s Real and we can know Him if we attend to His Presence. 

# # #

Asking what’s gone wrong with our kids is an ancient endeavor, but these days we must deal with what seems to be an unusually troubled younger generation awash in a “youth mental health crisis.”  Abigail Shrier, in Bad Therapy:  Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up (New York:  Penguin Publishing Company, c. 2024; Kindle Edition) offers a thoughtful analysis that merits attention.   While acknowledging some youngsters need serious psychological treatment she’s concerned about “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad.  College coeds who can’t apply for a job without three or ten calls to Mom.”  They’re not mentally ill but they’re doing poorly and look for “diagnoses to explain the way they feel.”  Rarely does this help, but:  “We shower these kids with meds, therapy, mental health and ‘wellness’ resources, even prophylactically.  We rush to remedy a misdiagnosed condition with the wrong sort of cure” (p. xii).  

Shrier remembers how she was reared.  Parents spanked when necessary and rarely worried about their kids’ feelings.  They were told where to go, how to dress and behave.  Probing their kids’ psyches for some “repressed identity” never occurred to them.  “But as millions of women and men my age entered adulthood,” she says, “we commenced therapy.  We explored our childhoods and learned to see our parents as emotionally stunted.  Emotionally stunted parents expected too much, listened too little, and failed to discover their kids’ hidden pain.  Emotionally stunted parents inflicted emotional injury” (p. xv).  Resolving to do better, her generation determined to rear “happy” kids.  “We resolved to listen better, inquire more, monitor our kids’ moods, accommodate their opinions when making a family decision, and, whenever possible, anticipate our kids’ distress.  We would cherish our relationship with our kids. Tear down the barrier of authority past generations had erected between parent and child and instead see our children as teammates, mentees, buddies” (p. xvi).   And to do so they trusted a bevy of “wellness experts.”   

       Such experts were anxious and willing to help!  Therapy would solve all problems.  To provide more help than professional therapists could give school administrators jumped into the “crisis” and urged teachers to counsel and coddle their students, becoming “partners” with their parents in providing emotional comfort.  Shrier and millions more “bought in, believing they would cultivate the happiest, most well-adjusted kids.  Instead, with unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record.  Why?  How did the first generation to raise kids without spanking produce the first generation to declare they never wanted kids of their own?  How did kids raised so gently come to believe that they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma?  How did kids who received far more psychotherapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair?” (p. xvii).  How indeed?  

The answer was therapy and more therapy.  Tragically, Shrier thinks, this resulted in an epidemic of iatrogenesis, illustrating how “healers” often make things worse.  “Well-meaning therapists often act as though talking through your problems with a professional is good for everyone.  That isn’t so” (p. 8).  Talking doesn’t always help, as careful studies dealing with policemen, burn victims, breast cancer patients, and grief-ridden mourners show.  Folks who say they don’’t want to talk about their problems are often much wiser than those who insist they do!  Unfortunately we’ve been persuaded that lots of us are sick.  Most Gen Zers think they have mental health issues and almost “40 percent of the rising generation has received treatment from a mental health professional—compared with 26 percent of Gen Xers” (p. 17).  To meet their needs “wellness centers” have sprouted on most college campuses and professors are routinely advised to make allowances for all sorts of mental health problems.  Yet the problems proliferate with no indication that treatments succeed.  

   This suggests, to Shrier, that we’ve been overwhelmed by “bad therapy.”  She thinks this, in part, because of scholars like Camilo Ortiz, a “tenured professor and leading child and adolescent psychologist.”  His research shows that “individual therapy has almost no proven benefit for kids.”  If anyone needs help it’s the parents,  who too often “unwittingly transmit their own anxiety to their kids.”  However,  “numberless psychotherapists not only offer individual therapy to young kids, they practice techniques like ‘play therapy’ that have shown scant evidence of benefiting kids. In fact, there’s very little evidence that individual (one-on-one) psychotherapy helps young kids at all” (p. 40).  

Consulting Ortiz and other scholars, Shrier lists 10 Bad Therapy steps:  (1)  Teach Kids to Pay Close Attention to their Feelings—in fact they should learn to distrust their emotions and often repress them;  (2)  Induce Rumination—in fact rehashing often harms a person; (3)  Make “Happiness” a Goal but Reward Emotional Suffering—in fact happiness comes as a result of doing things well; (4) Affirm and Accommodate Kids’ Worries—in fact they need to confront and deal with them; (5) Monitor, Monitor, Monitor—in fact they need to be supervised less and left alone much more than they are; (6)  Dispense Diagnoses Liberally—in fact we need to stop labeling kids’ disorders (e.g. ADHD) and treat them as ordinary aspects of growing up; (7) Drug ’Em—in fact drugs such as Ritalin should be administered only as a last resort; (8) Encourage Kids to Share Their “Trauma”—in fact, the less they share the better they fare; (9) Encourage Young Adults to Break Contact with “Toxic” Family—in fact few families are truly “toxic” and severing oneself from those who love them best rarely helps anyone; (10) Create Treatment Dependency—in fact interminable therapy sessions enrich counselors while harming kids.  In sum:  “Bad therapy encourages hyperfocus on one’s emotional states, which in turn makes symptoms worse” (p. 64).

Compounding the bad therapy kids may get in counselors’ offices, the nation’s schools are redesigning themselves as therapeutic care centers, flying the flag of  SEL (social-emotional learning).  Add to SEL the “restorative justice” President Barack Obama urged in his 2014 “Dear Colleague Letter” threatening schools with loss of funding if they continued to suspend and expel a disproportionate number of minority kids.  This presented schools with a quandary:  How do you maintain order without punishment?  The Dear Colleague Letter spelled out the solution:  “‘restorative practices, counseling, and structured systems of positive interventions.’  Violent kids were rebranded as kids in pain.  Schools stopped suspending or expelling them.  And a newly invigorated era of mental health in public schools was born. ‘Restorative justice’ is the official name for schools’ therapeutic approach that reimagines all bad behavior as a cry for help” (p. 94). 

Consequently, says Shrier:  “For more than a decade, teachers, counselors, and school psychologists have all been playing shrink, introducing the iatrogenic risks of therapy to schoolkids, a vast and captive population” (p. 71).  Teachers—even in math classes— may very well begin the day by asking their students how they’re feeling and even engaging in forms of group therapy urging them to confess their deepest anxieties.  “Sometimes described by enthusiasts as ‘a way of life,’ social-emotional learning is the curricular juggernaut that devours billions in education spending each year and upward of 8 percent of teacher time” (p. 77).  In SEL sessions kids’ parents are often blamed for a variety of problems and often referred to as “caregivers” or “service providers” who fail to treat their clients well.  Some “experts” even dismiss parents as “morons” incapable to rightly parenting.  Meanwhile, under their” guidance kids behave worse and schools appear increasingly anarchical.  

And their parents, determined to be “gentle” with their children cooperate with the teachers and therapists who declare they know how kids should be reared.  Earlier generations, however, “had a more masculine style of parenting.”  Dads usually did the disciplining but moms certainly did their fair share.  “This is the style I’ve called ‘knock it off, shake it off’ parenting.  The sort that met kids’ interpersonal conflict with ‘Work it out yourselves,’ and greeted kids’ mishaps with ‘You’ll live.’  A loving but stolid insistence that young children get back on the horse and carry on” (p. 168).  The “Battered Mommy Syndrome”—kids punching and kicking their parents—was unheard of.  Three-year olds weren’t asked for advice, nor did children dictate the dinner menu.  Youngsters were rarely considered particularly “sensitive” or “brittle” since they usually proved quite resilient in even difficult situations.  

Indeed they can be resilient if only they’re left alone to grow up as kids have done for centuries.  They don’t need drugs or counselors or constant monitoring.  Shrier has determined to relax and let her kids take risks, fall down and get up without dramatics, make friends on their own, etc.  She’s persuaded that many alleged childhood “disorders” can be corrected by assigning chores and demanding respect for elders.  Above all she urges readers to discern and flee bad therapy.  One a broader scale, perhaps all of us should free ourselves from the bad therapeutic culture advancing upon us in virtually all our institutions.

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Much that Abigail Shrier describes in Bad Therapy was discerned by one of the finest thinkers of the past century, Philip Rieff, in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c. 1966), wherein he  warned educational and religious leaders to beware of psychological nostrums.  We’ve witnessed his prophetic insights as what Christian Smith called “moralistic, therapeutic deism” has secured a dominant position in the cultural landscape.  In our world, Rieff said,  “hospital and theater,” fitness centers and films, are replacing family and nation.  “Religious man was born to be saved,” he noted, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.  The difference was established long ago, when ‘I believe,’ the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to ‘one feels,’ the caveat of the therapeutic” (p. 25).  Within the Christian tradition, this trend surfaced as early as 1857, when “Archbishop Temple put into clear English what had been muddled in German ever since the time of Schleiermacher:  ‘Our theology has been cast in a scholastic mould, all based on logic. We are in need of, and are actually being forced into, a theology based on psychology” (p. 42).  

       Ancient and Medieval civilization developed through the subjugation of our sensual desires, choosing to follow moral standards rather than pleasures.  The highest kind of knowledge is attained through faith—knowing and obeying God.  The good life in conforming to creation and the Creator.  This tradition of self-discipline and responsibility—labeled by Rieff a “dialectic of perfection, based on the deprivational mode” celebrating martyrs and saints, “is being succeeded by a dialectic of fulfillment, based on the appetitive mode” (p. 50).  Rather than restraining himself, psychological man seeks to “be kind” to himself.  An egoistic ethic of self-esteem and tolerance replaces the ethic of repentance and sanctity.  The “ideal man,” from Plato to Tocqueville, was understood to be a “good citizen,” sacrificing his own interests for the welfare of others.   In the emergent therapeutic culture, however, the “ideal man”—as is evident everywhere from the Oval Office to the box office—knows how to amuse himself.     Beginning with Francis Bacon, however, a new approach, progresively shaped by psychoanalytic theory, has exerted control.  According to this theory, we must learn how to change what is, to “create our own” reality, to craft whatever suits our desires.  Marx wielded philosophy as a hammer and sickle for social change. Freud proffered clients insights whereby they could choose whatever seemed desirable. Jung and Adler and hosts of lesser folks followed suit, and our world is largely ruled by folks who want to rule!                                            This led Rieff into extensive discussions of Jung, Reich, and D.H. Lawrence–thorough, penetrating, illuminating analyses. He showed, persuasively, how the “sexual revolution” has its roots in the likes of such intellectuals, and he makes clear how effectively they have subverted Western civilization.  As a result of adopting this therapeutic approach, many folks in our society lack the arresting sense of sin which typified the classical culture.  Indeed, it is “incomprehensible to him inasmuch as the moral demand system no longer generates powerful inclinations toward obedience or faith, nor feelings of guilt when those inclination are over-ridden by others for which sin is the ancient name” (p. 245).  No longer haunted by sin, modern man feels no need for salvation, no desire for a Savior.  So churches emphasize “religious” experiences and advertise “spiritual” therapies designed to help vaguely distressed people feel better.  Many, indeed, have “become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution–under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic” (p. 251).  Such, Rieff insists, is quite wrong-headed and needs to be rejected, but it’s what’s happened under the reign of modernity.                                                                                                                                                                                                                               * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * In My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, c. 2006), the first volume of a trilogy entitled Sacred Order/Social Order, Philip Rieff explored the fact that “cultures give readings of sacred order and ourselves somewhere in it.”  Throughout human history, James Davison Hunter explains, all cultures have been “constituted by a system of moral demands that are underwritten by an authority that is vertical in its structure.  . . . .  These are not merely rules or norms or values, but rather doxa: truths acknowledged and experienced as commanding in character” (p. xix).  First World (pagan) and Second World (Judeo-Christian) Cultures—to use Rieff’s categories—humbly aligned themselves with a higher, invisible Reality:  the Sacred.                                                     The modem (what Rieff labels “Third World”) culture shapers, working out the position espoused by Nietzsche’s Gay Science declaring that “God is dead,” have negated that ancient sacred order. Turning away from, indeed assailing, any transcendent realm, they have rigidly restricted themselves to things horizontal—material phenomena and human perspectives.  Rather than reading Reality, they actively encourage illiteracy regarding it—e.g. idiosyncratic “reader responses” to “texts,” the venting of personal opinions, and the construction of virtual realities.  Their relentless attacks upon the sacred are what Rieff calls “deathworks” that are both surreptitious and ubiquitous, shaping the arts and education, dominating movies and TV, journalism and fiction, law schools and courtrooms.  As he says: “There are now armies of third world teachers, artists, therapists, etc., teaching the higher illiteracy” (p. 92).                                                                     

Throughout his treatise, Rieff weighed the import of the raging culture war.  This Kulturkampf “is between those who assert that there are no truths, only readings, that is, fictions (which assume the very ephemeral status of truth for negational purposes) and what is left of the second culture elites in the priesthood, rabbinate, and other teaching/directive elites dedicated to the proposition that the truths have been revealed and require constant rereading and application in the light of the particular historical circumstance in which we live.  And that those commanding truths in their range are authoritative and remains so” (p. 17).  He especially emphasizes that: “The guiding elites of our third world are virtuosi of de-creation, of fictions where once commanding truths were” (p. 4). By denying all religious and moral truths, they have established an effectually godless “anti-culture.”                  Rieff’s analyses of influential artistic works (many of them reproduced in the text) are particularly insightful and persuasive. What was evident a century ago in only a few artists (James Joyce and Pablo Picasso), and psychoanalysts (Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung), now dominates the mass media and university classrooms, where postmodern gurus Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are routinely invoked.  One thing these elites, will not acknowledge:  any transcendent, ”divine creator and his promised redemptive acts before whom and beside which there is nothing that means anything” (p. 58).  Nietzsche folly understood this, propounding “a rationalism so radical that it empties itself, as God the Father was once thought to have emptied himself to become very man in the Son.”  (p. 70).                         Rieffs grandfather, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, “was appalled to discover not only in the remnant of his family in Chicago but in the Jewish community of the family’s Conservative synagogue . . .  that the Jewish sense of commanding truth was all but destroyed.  Those old traditions were treated as obsolete, replaced by the phrase that horrified my grandfather most:  everyone is entitled to their own opinion” (p. 82).  The nihilism of the Nazis flourished in Chicago!  To Rieff, Auschwitz signifies “the first full and brutally clear arrival of our third world” (p. 83). But the death camps, both Nazi and Bolshevik, were simply the logical culmination of Hamlet’s ancient view that “there is nothing good or bad in any world except thinking makes it so’” (p. 83).   What was manifest in Auschwitz, Rieff says, is equally evident in the world’s abortion mills!  In one of Freud’s letters, we read a “death sentence, casually uttered, upon sacred self:  ‘Similarly birth, miscarriage, and menstruation are all connected with the lavatory via the word Abort (Abortus).’  How many things,” Rieff muses, “turn before my eyes into images of our flush-away third world” (p. 104).  Rejecting “pro-choice” rhetoric, he insists: “The abortionist movement does bear comparison the Shoah [the Jewish Holocaust].  In these historic cases both Jews and ‘fetuses’ are what they represent, symbols of our second world God.  It is as godterms that they are being sacrificed” (p. 105).      My Life among the Deathworks, says Hunter, “is stunning in its originality, breathtaking in its erudition and intellectual range, and astonishing in the brilliance of its insights into our historical moment” (p. xv).  It is however “difficult, intentionally so,” because “Rieff wants the reader to work for the insight he has to offer; to read and then reread” (p. xvi). The book rather resembles Pascal’s Pensees—a collage of aphorisms and illustrations (many of them paintings) rather than a systematic development of a thesis. The book does, however, richly reward the reader’s persistence.

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Philosopher Mark Goldblatt would consider bad therapy a result of philosophical developments  leading to the declaration: I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism (New York:  Bombardier Books, c.  2022; Kindle Edition).  He cites G.K. Chesterton’s words from a century ago:   “We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.”  Reason is drowning in a sea of emotion wherein everyone decides what is true or false,  right or wrong, on the basis of how it feels.  This is not exactly a unique moment, however, for Pilate asked Jesus “What is truth?”  He seemed to be tossing aside the possibility of Truth’s existence in any transcendent sense.  To him truth was simply instrumental, finding out what works to one’s own advantage.  He had the power to kill Jesus and did so, washing his hands in the process.  So it follows that today’s subjectivism is amply evident and clearly rooted in the perspectivism of Friedrich Nietzsche, who called Pilate the “solitary figure worthy of honor” in the New Testament.  In Goldblatt’s view, we are now “having a Pontius Pilate moment.  What is truth?  Whatever you will.  Whatever you can.  Whatever you dare” (p. 7).  Many of the major issues confronting us are, most deeply, questions of truth.  Is truth a clear seeing and accepting of what is—a “correspondence” between what I think and Reality—or is it merely what I imagine things are or ought to be?  Is truth objective or subjective?  “Objective truth is revealed by a careful examination of evidence and the application of logic to that evidence.  Objective truth is true regardless of our subjective feelings about it because it is anchored in the object of the belief or proposition; it is a relationship between out-there and in-here, an alignment between the two” (p. 15).  Philosophically it’s a form of realism.  Subjectivism, however, is a branch of idealism that “foregrounds not reality but perception.”  Following George Berkeley, “To be is to be perceived. Esse est percipi.”   As Goldblatt shows, many modern movements—Black Lives Matter, Transgenderism, et al—share this subjectivism.  MY truth is THE truth!  And feelings are triumphant!

Taking seriously Pope Francis’ recent words to the Roman Curia—“Brothers and sisters, Christendom no longer exists!”—some scholars at the University of Mary (a college in Bismarck, North Dakota, that was established in 1987 and now enrolls some 5000 students) worked with James P. Shea to publish From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age (Bismarck, N.D.:  University of Mary Press., c. 2020; Kindle Edition).   This is hardly a novel concern, for in 1974 Archbishop Fulton Sheen said:   “We are at the end of Christendom.  Not of Christianity, not of the Church, but of Christendom.  Now what is meant by Christendom?  Christendom is economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles.”  It created a wonderful culture—gothic cathedrals, universities, hospitals, theologians and saints—for which we should give thanks.  But, Sheen insisted:  “That is ending — we’ve seen it die.”  Nevertheless:  “These are great and wonderful days in which to be alive.  . . . .  It is not a gloomy picture — it is a picture of the Church in the midst of increasing opposition from the world. And therefore live your lives in the full consciousness of this hour of testing, and rally close to the heart of Christ.”  Shea and his friends want to do precisely that by recovering an apostolic mindset.

Our formerly Western Christian culture has been slowly but surely disintegrating.  Dealing with it brings challenges not faced by early missionaries proclaiming the Good News to a pagan world.  C.S. Lewis said it is difference between a man wooing a young maiden and a man winning a cynical divorcée back to her previous marriage.  More disquieting:  many non-Christians actually call themselves Christian!  Many things have contributed to this development, including the massive changes wrought by technology.  But the “key battles our culture faces are intellectual ones” (p. 11).  Until we learn to think in truly Christian ways we’ll never evangelize our world.  These challenges will not likely be met by academics, for our institutions of higher learning “are often so decayed in purpose (apart from technical training) that not much wisdom or light is to be hoped from them; for various reasons, they can tend to deform rather than enlighten the minds of those who come under their influence.  Rather, what is needed is the sort of intellectual life that was characteristic of the Church in her early centuries, a life possessed to some degree by every Christian.  It is not simply or primarily a matter of college degrees but of the conversion of the mind to a Christian vision of reality and of readiness to live out the ramifications of that vision.  A compelling Christian narrative is called for, one that provides a counter to the secular vision, that helps Christians understand and fend off false gospels” (p. 12).

We must deal with the “spirit of the age” by casting a fresh vision, rooted in a new way of discerning truth, that offers people something more than this world affords.  As is true of any worldview, it will need to include philosophy, art, science, religion, et al. in setting forth a narrative describing the “cosmic battle for souls between God and the devil” and declaring the way to join the winning side.  In its beginnings, the Christian Church worked in accord with “an apostolic mode, by which is meant that she was making her way against the current of the wider society and needed to articulate and maintain a distinct and contrasting vision” (p. 19).  Different strategies were employed when addressing Jews or Gentiles—early evangelists dealt with the audience at hand, and we must also open our hearts to Christ and follow His way in our world.  We need to recover an apostolic zeal with strategies shaped to reach our generation, with “new movements and religious communities being born or rediscovering their vitality; institutions being founded or reformed; a deepening life of prayer and communal witness being expressed” (p. 38).  As ever, this will come about not by orchestrating mass movements but by heeding creative minorities who deeply believe in and proclaim the “Good News:  “that God in his mercy has come among us to set us free from our sins and from slavery to the devil, and for those who turn to their true allegiance, the nightmare of life apart from God can be transformed into a dawn of eternal hope.  They need to know, from their own experience, that obedience to the Gospel is perfect freedom, that holiness leads to happiness, that a world without God is a desolate wasteland, and that new life in Christ transforms darkness into light” (p. 43).

  The Good News is good for all peoples at all times.  It’s embraced by individuals, one at a time, who find it both true and efficacious.  It’s generally more effectively proclaimed by witnesses than scholars, by missionaries than moralists.   People need to turn around, learn to think differently, to be truly converted, and:  “Every conversion is a marvel of grace, an astonishing work of God.  Saint Augustine once said that it was a greater miracle for God to save one sinner than to have created the whole world. Augustine’s comment points to the attitude appropriate to an apostolic age” (p. 45).  Embracing an Apostolic Agenda, modern missionaries “should assume that the majority of their hearers are unconverted or half-converted in mind and imagination and have embraced to some degree the dominant non-Christian vision” (p. 71).  So the Good News must be set forth “in such a way that the minds of its hearers can be given the opportunity to be transformed, converted from one way of looking at the world to a different way” (p. 70).

Importantly, getting converted means replacing a mechanistic with a sacramental worldview.  There are invisible as well as visible realities in our world, “and the invisible world is incomparably more real, more lasting, more beautiful, and larger than the visible.  Our blindness to that world represents much of our predicament.  We are caught by the illusion of the merely seen and need to have our blindness cured.  This drama involves us not only with the awful and marvelous and incomprehensible being of God, who created us with a decisive purpose in mind, but also with a cosmic struggle among creatures of spirit more powerful than we are, who influence human life for both good and evil.  We have been born into a battle, and we are given the fearful and dignifying burden of choice: we need to take a side.”  We are designed and destined for eternity.  Our lives make a difference because we’ve been created for a reason.  “Not only are we meant to know good things, happiness, strength, length of existence, but we have been created to experience the unthinkable:  to share in the very nature of God, to become — in the language so beloved by Eastern Christians — ‘divinized.’  Created from the passing stuff of the material world fused with an invisible and immortal soul, we are each of us meant to be what we would be tempted to call gods: creatures of dazzling light and strength, beauty and goodness, sharing in and reflecting the power and beauty of the Infinite God” (p. 76).  Now that’s Good News!

Each of us has an assignment if we’re to live as apostles.  We have only one life to live and need to live it well.  We must both take the world lightly and earnestly work to make it better.  If we’re honest we realize we’ll not much matter, as the world calculates things.  But Christians need to remember “that in dealing with even the smallest details of life, they are working out an eternal destiny.  They fight the darkness within themselves and embrace the life of love laid out for them by Christ, delighting in conforming their wills to his, knowing that obedience to him does not limit them or impede their self-development but rather brings them to their true selves, to freedom and fulfillment.  They live as exiles, in hope and hard fighting, waiting for the final triumph of God, full of gratitude for what they have been given, full of hope for all they have been promised, full of love originating in Christ toward others who need to hear the good news of a merciful and forgiving and gift-giving God” (p. 79).

This is a book written by Catholics for Catholics.  But it provides an analysis and agenda for all believers.  Given the collapse of Christendom, we need not fear, for God is with us.  And empowered by His Spirit we can do what the apostles did long ago:  proclaim and live out the Good News.

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In a sequel to From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age, Jonathan Reyes and someprofessors from the University of Mary have set forth The Religion of the Day (Bismarck, N.D.:  University of Mary Press, c. 2023; Kindle Edition), attempting, as the title specifies, to analyze today’s dominant religion and propose ways for Christians to counter it—searching for clues in the first century when “God in Christ came among us to wage a spiritual battle and, in every age since the time of its founding by Christ, the Church has been engaged in a kind of three-front war.  On one front, Christians fight an external battle against the unbelief of a fallen world; a second front is an internal battle against disloyalty and corruption among Church members; and most importantly, the third front is a fight against the darkness and unbelief of one particular member of the Church:  namely, ourselves.  Much of the nature of that battle is the same in every age: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8), and human nature, despite what many current philosophies want to suggest, is fundamentally constant” (p. 10).  

Inasmuch as man is by nature incurably religious the basic question in every era is what form religion takes.  The book’s authors think we the religion of our age is Progressivism, which is basically Neo-Gnosticism (more definitively described as a “Modern Neo-Gnostic Progressive Utopian Revolutionary Religion”—a revival of perhaps the most persistent heresy in Church history. It was St Thomas Aquinas’s  main adversary, and it has been clearly propounded by a series of thinkers since the Enlightenment.  Thus John Dewey, the American philosopher still influencing this nation’s educational and political classes (who helped draft the “Humanist Manifesto”) called for a “humanistic religion” focused on Man rather than God.  Progressives like Dewey think we can save ourselves, following a variety of self-help schemes, because all the evils in the world result from flawed material and social arrangements.  Remaking the world in accord with our needs and desires will enable us to become (as Eleanor Roosevelt famously said) “better and better” persons living with another in perfect accord.  It is, as the authors perceptively declare, essentially “an expression of human pride” (p. 21).

The memorable lyrics of John Lennon embody the progressive religion:  “Imagine there’s no heaven; It’s easy if you try. / No hell below us; Above us, only sky. / You may say I’m a dreamer; But I’m not the only one. / I hope someday you’ll join us, And the world will be as one.”  Unpacking this more prosaically, the authors provide a helpful analysis of Twelve Aspects of Modern Progressive Religion, beginning with the typical Gnostic sense of alienation from the world, a feeling that something’s deeply wrong with the world as it is.  It’s not us—there’s no original sin in the Gnostic mind—but a world that’s deeply flawed. else. “‘Not my fault!’ is the universal Progressive religious mantra” (p. 28).  Without remorse, without repentance, modern religionists must imagine or dream of  something better attainable through esoteric knowledge of some sort, or remaking what is into what ought to be, even destroying the existing creation to make way for a better one.  If there is a Creator He failed to make tings as they ought to be.  The first great Cristian critique of Gnosticism, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, “wrote that the essence of all Gnostic sects was blasphemy against the Creator,” a trait still evident in Neo-Gnosticism. 

“Voltaire’s famous cry against the Church, ‘Écrasez l’infâme!’ (‘Crush the loathsome thing!’) is the battle cry of Progressive believers against the order of the current world and against the God who is perceived as somehow standing behind it, as they insist on the utter annihilation of the structure of an oppressive system as the necessary prerequisite for the new age of freedom to come” (p. 31).  Man must master his world, technologically transforming what is into what he wants it to be.  Man’s knowledge provides the key.  Not “Jesus saves” but “we will save” sets the agenda.  Drawing upon the Hegelian/Marxist dialectic, progressives seek to ever be on “the right side of history,” and “morally up-to-date,” making the world a better place.  As was true of the French leftists in 1789, today’s progressives champion revolution:  “Revolution – the annihilation of the structures of oppression – is the privileged means by which Progressive belief will bring about the new age of freedom.  . . . .  This is clear in Karl Marx’s famous revolutionary dictum, ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’” (p. 45).  

We see the revolutionary ethos in today’s youthful protesters who cheerfully embrace violence.  To gain their goals they promote the “cancel culture” so evident in American universities.  No dissent is allowed, no gradualism will suffice.  All must be uprooted and replaced.  Oppressive systems must be destroyed.  Consequently, a “program of willful systematic amnesia begins with artifacts – statues, texts, uses of language – but if the requisite power is gained it always moves on to eliminating living humans.  The logic of tearing down statues and erasing words is the same as the impetus behind the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror, the Soviet gulag, the Chinese cultural revolution, and the Nazi death camps. The sources and expressions of evil must be hunted down and eliminated so that the pure society can properly arrive” (p. 47).  As gnostic movements have risen and fallen in the past, so too it’s modern expression will ultimately fail.  But in our day it’s powerful and virulent.  Its power stands exposed in the 2005 treatise by sociologists Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton—Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers—describing what young Americans believe.  “They famously coined the term ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ or ‘MTD’ to describe what those teenagers, including Christian ones, most commonly believed” (p. 65).  They think there’s a God out there somewhere who created the world who mainly wants us to “be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.  The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.  God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.  Good people go to heaven when they die” (p. 66).  

This is of course anything but orthodox, traditional Christianity!  To address it we need not fear the darkness but learn to light candles illuminating it with Christ’s Light, to work with Him in rescuing the perishing.  We must begin by stressing the astounding fact of His Incarnation.  God really did become man.  The Maker of all that is actually lived among us—Immanuel, God with us.  “As C. S. Lewis once observed with the claim of the Incarnation in mind, ‘One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance.  The one thing it cannot be is moderately important’” (p. 72).  Of all places, we must begin the battle for truth and righteousness within the Church!  The Progressive religion has poisoned too many professing Christians “who have abandoned key doctrines of the faith and have embraced some form of the neo-Gnostic gospel of personal self-creation” (p. 99).  They imagine themselves to be “Christians” but have never “encountered the risen Christ as their Lord and Savior” (p. 100).  They think everyone is basically good rather than sinful and need not so much a redeemer as a cheerleader.  

Simultaneously we must do battle within our own souls.  “God’s kingdom is established on earth mainly by personal conversion and holiness:  the saints are the true movers and shakers of history” (p. 98).  Rather than agitating for social justice we need to focus on being justified, made right, by God.  We need less to march in the streets than stand patiently with Christ.  We fight for the Faith with spiritual weapons, resisting the devil and boldly declaring the Word of the Lord.  It’s better to be a martyr than an emperor.  Facing an increasingly non-Christian world we must nevertheless believe God providentially brought us into it.  Now is our time.   This is our time.  ‘We will neither be lost in nostalgia for a distant time in the past, nor will we fall into the trap of thinking that Christianity is now ‘outmoded’ and needing a fundamental change of belief or morality. Instead, we will seek wisdom to understand how Christ is responding to our times, as the Gospel of the One who is ‘ever ancient and ever new continues to reach out to save the lost” (p. 131).

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Eric Metaxas, the author of the highly-acclaimed Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, recently published Letter to the American Church (Washington, D.C.:  Salem Publishing, c. 2022; Kindle Edition), applying insights gained from writing it.  He wrote “this book because I am convinced the American Church is at an impossibly—and almost unbearably—important inflection point.  The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim” (p. ix).  We may fail to realize that we are as immersed in evil as were the Germans under Hitler’s control, but we are in fact facing anti-God ideologies such as “Critical Race Theory,” LGBTQ+ rationales,  and pro-abortion rhetoric.  Rather than identify and oppose them, too many churchmen have set aside the Gospel in order to please cultural elites championing such perversions.  Few German pastors in 1932 understood that one must act when there’s still time to do so and that small steps determine the course of one’s future.  

Too often the Church fears to appear judgmental, to condemn evil, to oppose persons and organizations promoting it.  But Metaxas wonders:  “Where did we get the idea that we shouldn’t be at the forefront in criticizing the great evil of Communist countries like China that brutally persecute religious minorities in ways that bring to mind the Nazis themselves?” (p. 5).  What we should learn from Bonhoeffer is the importance of resisting evil, discerning its presence and speaking out at its manifestations.  Pastors and theologians are especially responsible for doing so.  Unfortunately, in 1954 Senator Lyndon Johnson orchestrated legislation that forbade churches from endorsing political figures, threatening the churches’ tax exempt status!  Inasmuch as they remained silent at this move to quiet them, “they behaved rather like many of the submissive pastors in Germany two decades earlier” (p. 8).  Still fearful of the taxman, all too many American churchmen still refuse to publicly hold politicians responsible for their behavior.  They’ve lost the courage to enter the public square and fight for justice.  Though few of us know much about the “Johnson Amendment” and the government’s capacity to quash religious freedom, churches saw it vanish during the recent COVID-19 shutdowns.  Churches were actually deemed “non-essential” and ordered to close their doors.  Virtually all of them did!  Marijuana dispensaries and strip clubs stayed open but churches closed and pastors said nothing.   “When questionable medical procedures were being forced on their parishioners . . .  they meekly adopted the stance that it was the ‘Christ-like’ thing to submit and not to fight, nor even to mention such tremendously serious issues.  This was a deeply disgraceful moment for the American Church” (p. 12).

That moment came for Bonhoeffer when, on Reformation Sunday in 1932, he  preached a message in an historic Berlin church.   “Rather than stroke the egos of those German elites slumbering in the pews, Bonhoeffer’s sermon was calculated to wake them up, if they were still able to be awakened” (p. 25).  Midway through his message, the authorities shut down the broadcast.  “To put it in our own modern parlance,” Metaxas says, he “had just been ‘cancelled.’”  Thenceforth he sought ways to resist the Nazis, helping lead the “Confessing Church” in opposition to the pro-Nazi, state-subsidized “Deutsche Christen” (Christian Church).  In time, only 3,000 of Germany’s 18,000 pastors stood with Bonhoeffer.  Many of them would be arrested and killed.  The majority failed to discern what was actually happening.  “They could not believe that the Nazis were devotedly anti-Christian—and that they were essentially atheist and pagan tribalists working to eventually obliterate the Christian Church” (p. 48).  Somewhat the same is now taking place—witness the rainbow banners and BLM flags on churches.  Such acts compromise the Faith and  churchmen must be resisted.   People need courageous leaders, and “God expects those who have a voice to speak out for those who do not—who most of all tend to be the poorest among us” (p. 13).  The COVID pandemic has receded and the church doors have opened, but today we’re besieged by Critical Race Theorists who want to indoctrinate our children and by homosexual and transgender ideologists who work to undermine the Christian Way.  It’s time, Metaxas thinks, for some new Bonhoeffers!  

Himself childless, C.S. Lewis still wrote:  “Children are not a distraction from more important work.  They are the most important work.”  Yet one of the more distressing developments during the past half-century is the failure of men to embrace their traditional roles as fathers of children and providers/protectors of women.  Whether or not this is the result of men simply discarding their responsibilities or of women emasculating them is highly debated, but Nancy Pearcey gives valuable views in The Toxic War on Masculinity:  How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes (Grand Rapids:  Baker Publishing Group, c. 2023; Kindle Edition).  Pearcey has written numerous highly-praised books, including Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity and How Now Shall We Live? (coauthored with  the late Chuck Colson).  She was praised by The Economist as “America’s pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual,” and is currently a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. 

Though reared in a Christian home Pearcey struggled with her faith—in large part because of her highly-respected but abusive father.  In high school she discarded Christianity and became a committed feminist.  Then, wandering about Europe in search of something to live for, she stumbled into Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri.  There, “for the first time I discovered that there exists something called Christian apologetics, and I was stunned.  I had no idea that Christianity could be supported by logic and reasons and good arguments.  Eventually I found the arguments persuasive and I reconverted to Christianity” (p. 14).  This move prompted her to rethink her feminist agenda in the light of biblical truth.  “So in a sense,” she says,  “I’ve been writing this book my entire life. As a little girl, I wondered how a man could sometimes be so wonderful and at other times so cruel.  As an adult, I have had to spend literally decades thinking through how to define a healthy, biblical concept of masculinity.  What is the God-given pattern for manhood?  How did Western culture lose it?  And how can we recover it?” (p. 14)

       She begins by noting that if masculinity is considered “toxic”—as it is by many—the best solution is emasculation!  Rip the maleness out of men!  Thus in 2018 the American Psychological Association (APA) issued guidelines for counseling men and boys, denouncing “traditional masculinity ideology” as “psychologically harmful.”  Influential gender studies professors justify hating men simply because they’re men.  There’s even a hashtag, #KillAllMen and books titled I Hate Men, The End of Men, and Are Men Necessary?  From many cultural sectors comes a strong message:  masculinity, like arsenic, is toxic!  But Pearcey wants to celebrate what’s good about men and help them live up to the goodness of their creation.  She says:  “Because of testosterone, men are typically larger, stronger, and faster than women.  In general, they are also more physical, more competitive, and more risk-taking. We need to affirm these God-given traits as good when used to honor and serve others” (p. 18).  In fact:  “We should not make the mistake of equating masculinity with men’s bad behavior.  A biblical worldview tells us that men were originally created to live by the ideal of the Good Man, exercising traits such as honor, courage, fidelity, and self-control.  A healthy society is one that teaches and encourages a God-centered view of masculinity” (p. 22).

      The Good Man, Pearcey insists, generally attends church!  Contrary to the stereotypical patriarch—an angry man ruling the family with an iron hand and traumatizing  women and children—the best research shows that devout, conservative evangelicals, regularly going to church, are the least abusive, most admirable males in America.  Citing Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, director of the National Marriage Project, and author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, she argues that the more devout the man the better he is as husband and father.  Wilcox says:  “‘the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. . . .  Fully 73 percent of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages’” (p. 39).  

Though American evangelicals may never have heard of St John Chrysostom, they’re living out his admonition, given 1600 years ago:  “Let everything take second place to care for our children, our bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”  Rooted in New Testament teachings, Ancient Church fathers such as Chrysostom proposed a “mutuality in conjugal rights.  It was a symmetry ‘at total variance . . . with pagan culture,’ writes sociologist Rodney Stark” (p. 53).  Christian women enjoyed a much higher status in the church than in pagan society and played a significant role in its development.  As the “head” of the family the father should act as a servant seeking others’ well-being rather than a tyrant exercising his authority.  He should sacrificially enable his wife and children to find their calling and exercise their spiritual gifts.  Such men are, Wilcox says, “soft patriarchs.”  

Unlike conservative Christian men, however, American males are struggling and  there is, Pearcey thinks, a toxic side to their worldview and behavior.  To understand why she conducts an in-depth historical search for some reasons and basically finds the Industrial Revolution largely responsible.  As long as families worked together on farms or cottage industries, most men took responsibility for their families and lived rightly.  During the colonial era, in New England “the ideal for manhood was not personal ambition or self-fulfillment but the subordination of one’s private interests for the common good.  As historian Gordon Wood explains, men ‘were expected to suppress their private wants and interests and develop disinterestedness—the term the eighteenth century most often used as a synonym for civic virtue’” (p. 77).  They were urged to be  “Christian gentlemen.”  Hundreds of religious publications in the 17th century praised men for being, one historian says, “‘forgiving, magnanimous, benevolent, virtuous, moderate, self-controlled, and a worthy citizen’” (p. 101).  

As they moved from farms to factories, however, American men embraced a more competitive, acquisitive philosophy and relied less on Christian principles.  Rather than embracing moral standards they were, in the 19th century one historian says, urged to be ambitious and strong in a competitive marketplace.  “By taking husbands and fathers out of the home, industrialization created the material conditions that made it more difficult to fulfill a biblical ideal of manhood.  Men were no longer physically present enough to be fully engaged husbands and fathers.  They spent most of their time in the public realm, which was growing increasingly secular.  The Industrial Revolution thus became a catalyst for the acceptance of secular views of masculinity” (p. 101).  With their men working away from home the women, almost by default, became the teachers and exemplars of virtue.  

So, as Frances Parkes said in 1825, the “world corrupts, home should refine.” Thirty  years later Ralph Waldo Emerson would hail women as the “civilizers of mankind.”  Harriet Beecher Stowe urged wives to “mother” their husbands for in time, she said, “the true wife becomes a mother to her husband; she guides him, cares for him, teaches him, and catechizes him in the nicest way possible.”  Given these cultural upheavals, women effectively took charge of families, schools and churches.  By the end of the century they constituted nearly 90 percent of Sunday morning church goers.  They generally had minimal doctrinal concerns but enthusiastically championed various reform movements—urging women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and closing “down taverns, saloons, brothels, and gambling houses.”  However well-intended, these reform endeavors easily  alienated men because they generally singled out male vices.  “As historian Mary Ryan points out, ‘Almost all the female reform associations were implicit condemnations of males; there was little doubt as to the sex of slave masters, tavern-keepers, drunkards, and seducers’” (p. 124). 

Deeply impacted by their fathers working away from home and their mothers taking charge of it were young men—fatherless sons.  More than a century ago Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, saw this as a serious problem needing attention, saying “God is the father, but how many families there are where the prototype of the divine is practically absent from Sunday to Sunday.”  When mothers tried to replace fathers their sons often rebelled, preferring to be a “bad” boy rather than a feminized weakling.  Consequently they were seen by some women as “Goths and Vandals”—little barbarians!  Boys read books celebrating cowboys, soldiers, and frontiersmen who found solace in wild, solitary places.  They found in the Boy Scouts an organization appealing to their “Noble Savage” urge.  The novelist Henry James spoke for many men in his novel The Bostonians (1886).  In the words of his male protagonist, Ransom:  “‘The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, hysterical, chattering, canting age.’  Ransome announces his intention to recover ‘the masculine character, the ability to dare and endure’” (p. 146).  

Throughout the past century men have struggled to rightly recover their masculine character.  They’ve done so amidst the growing problem of fatherless boys that has now become a crisis.  Neither the government nor the schools nor the churches have figured out how to restore the family to health.  The greatest challenge we face may very well be getting men to be good fathers.   To do so will entail significant changes and sacrifices.  Work needs to be reduced to a secondary vocation, making fathering a man’s real work.  Taking time to attend church—and support her activities helping children grow up—must become a priority.  If Pearcey’s right there’s little to hope for in the secular world.  But if Christians heed the call they can make a difference and become Good Men.  

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Whereas Pearcey still upholds many egalitarian aspects of her early feminism, Anthony Esolen sharply attacks it in No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men (Washingon:  Regnery Gateway, c. 2022; Kindle Edition.). The acclaimed translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy and one of the best Catholic writers in America, Esolen writes “to return to men a sense of their worth as men, and to give to boys the noble aim of manliness, an aim which is their due by right” (p. vii).  He urges us to look around and see how much men have accomplished.  “Every road you see was laid by men.  Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men” (p. x).  Wherever hard, necessary, physical things get done men (not women) do them.  “The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not do—and that the physically weaker sex could not have done” (p. x).  Men have nothing to apologize for! 

“Acquit yourselves like men,” Paul said in I Corinthians 16:13.  The Greek text is quite clear, for andrizeisthe means, literally, “Be men!”  Jerome’s Vulgate is equally clear:   “viriliter agite, ”Be men!”  Many modern translations, however, sooth feminist sensibilities by simply saying “be courageous” or “be brave.”  The admonition to men is erased!  So it goes even in the world of Bible translators!  To those who label masculinity toxic, Esolen replies:  “Who is toxic?  The word suggests something hidden, secret, sly.  Imagine someone sprinkling a bit of strychnine in the soup—not enough to kill, but certainly enough to make the diner sick.  That is similar to what is being done to boys in our schools and in mass entertainment.  They are told that there is something wrong with them because they are not like girls.  They are also told that girls can do all of the physical things they can, and perhaps do them better—an absurd falsehood.  Telling boys these things is poisonous, and I daresay it is intended to be so:  those who speak this way want the boys to be weaklings, to despise their own sex, to doubt their natural and healthy inclinations” (p. xiii).  Indeed, shouts Esolen, stop poisoning our boys!  Stop the teachers trying to make our boys little girls!  Enough!   

  Begin by dealing honestly with the facts.  Men are physically stronger—much stronger—than women.  Hundreds of high school boys run faster than female world champions.  “The strongest and fastest women in the world would be pulverized by a men’s professional football team.  You would not ask the score.  You would ask whether the women could stop a single play from scrimmage.  You would ask whether the women ended up in the hospital.  In fact, the best female athletes in the world would be made into mincemeat by a half-decent high school boys’ team.  They would be in danger of serious harm, because the boys would be heavier than they are, taller, faster, stronger, and with much more of that quick-surge muscle action that packs power into the shortest impulses” (p. 3).   Proving his point, recently “the Australian women’s World Cup soccer team was trounced, seven to two, by an under-sixteen boys’ team, and a similar thing happened to the American women’s team that actually won the World Cup” (p. 3). 

As in athletics, wherever you find mechanical systems sustaining modern technology you’ll almost certainly find that men designed and continue to maintain them.  So, Esolen says:  “If you call a plumber to deal with a sewer pipe that has backed up into your basement, it is a practical certainty that it is going to be a man, because the sheer strength required to deal with the valve rusted shut or with a section of pipe that has to be cut or muscled into place is like a threshold” (p. 40).  Sadly enough, our nation’s infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) is fraying and needs strong men to do the hard work necessary to repair it.  Where are we going to find such men when our boys are all told to go to college and get a desk job?  Women can’t do it and we’re not rearing boys to respect and embrace hard work.  It’s as if we think the world will run by “magic,” maintaining our comforts without requiring the hard work necessary to make it work.

Men often accomplish great things because they’re team players.  Eccentric geniuses certainly operate alone, but men typically want to get together to accomplish things.  Feminists frequently complain about the “old boys clubs” that keep women from succeeding, but in fact men simply like to be with other men.  They like to plan projects.  They launch hunting expeditions, as did Sioux men hunting bison, because working together is the only way to succeed.  “Out of the individual strengths and wills of the different men, you must create a new thing, a hunting party, whose members at work are less like separate individuals than like the limbs of a body” (p. 64).  The same instinct is at work when neighborhood boys come together to play football.  Esolen notes:  “For a very long time now, there have been girls’ basketball teams, and yet you rarely see a group of girls spontaneously organizing themselves for a game on a basketball court or spontaneously organizing themselves for a pickup game of softball.  Boys will invent more games in a year than girls have adopted from boys in fifty.  It is in their nature to do so” (p. 70).  

As they organize teams men embrace hierarchies.  Some men will be in charge of others, some skills will be more important than others.  There’s no egalitarian ethos on a sandlot baseball field or the NFL draft day!  “That men form hierarchies without embarrassment, and without necessarily destroying the real and important equality among them, is one of the most astonishing things we can say about them; it is something so common and so obvious that we do not even notice it.  But I say: if you do not have hierarchy, you will not only fail at civilization, you will fail even to have a strong tribe of savages in the woods.  You will not kill the bison” (p. 72).  A quarterback orders ten other players to carry out their assignment.  Should every man in the huddle be given equal opportunity to call the play?  Should every workman erecting a cathedral be allowed to design the building?  Effective teams can never be egalitarian.  Yet, apart from the task, such men may very well be best friends, comrades committed to treating each other as equals!  A team’s quarterback and cornerback have hugely different roles to play on the football field but may be inseparable friends attending the same church where the cornerback is considered an outstanding Bible teacher giving guidance to the team’s leader.  In a criminal trial a male prosecutor and his antagonist (the defense attorney) fight for their assigned side, then go out to dinner together with no injured egos.  They illustrate “the masculine capacity to set things in proper emotional compartments, to bracket, to feel and express great passion at one moment and then to set it aside as if it were irrelevant” (p. 94).

To Esolen:  “The miracle of culture and of civilization is the miracle of the transformation and redirection of masculine energy from the willful self to the team, the work crew, the school, and the army—for the sake of the home and the women at the center of the home, and, in the end, for the sake of the city and the nation” (p. 86).  So throughout the centuries men have worked together to build great things.  All-male Renaissance art studies gave us Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, and thousands of artists all over Europe.  We should be grateful!  That women were frequently excluded from such groups doesn’t trouble Esolen:  “No apologies, then, for the masculine institutions of the past.  Instead, we should question our refusing to grant to men and boys the opportunity or even the legal permission to form groups that are natural to them and that have proved to be so marvelously productive” (p. 87).  When boys build tree houses with signs saying “No Girls Allowed” let them be!  It’s part of the process of becoming a man as well as granting the “freedom of association” guaranteed by the Constitution.  

Nowhere are strong men needed more than at home.  Yet it’s everywhere evident that families are jeopardized by the shifting sands of modernity.  To Gabriel Marcel there was an “inexpressible sadness which emanates from great cities,” something rooted in “a self-betrayal of life “bound up in the most intimate fashion with the decay of the family.” In part this results from a feminist ideology saturated with by envy.  One of the seven deadly sins, “envy is always looking cross-eyed—that is what the Latin invidia means—at something good that someone else enjoys, and wishing to ruin the enjoyment.  It is spiritual poison for weaklings.  Specifically, envy is the spiritual poison for feminists who see what healthy men and women enjoy, do not themselves enjoy it, and therefore want to ruin it for everyone else.  We can see this in academe.  Feminist scholars have discovered no neglected female Chaucer, so they must tear the actual Chaucer down and make sure that nobody else learns from him, calling him a racist and a rapist and whatnot.  They cannot of themselves produce a Shakespeare, so they must tear him down or wrench his meaning away from the Christian faith he so often portrays in dramatic action.  And on it goes. They have discovered no neglected female Titian, no neglected female Bach. There are none to discover” (p. 100).  So too they hate traditional family and want to destroy it.

We need fathers—patriarchs—who rule wisely.  When they’re absent, boys turn aggressive and girls long for what’s gone.  Both go bad.  “If women lead men,” as is often the case today, Esolen asks, “where are the happy female bosses—and the joyful men they lead?  . . . .  Why do people in an egalitarian wonderland not sing their love of the sexes?  The truth is, as C. S. Lewis says, that love does not speak the language of equality.  It speaks the language of gratitude and superiority, of awe at the unique characteristics that make the beloved different from oneself. . . .  When fathers go absent, do not expect women to take their place” (p. 103).  We “can have patriarchy or not.  If not, you will either suffer anarchy—moral, intellectual, and civic—or you will suffer tyranny in your attempt to keep the anarchy from ruining everything . . .   You can have fathers who govern, or else you can have unattached and unaccountable males who take a dismal pleasure in doing nothing or a ferocious pleasure in destroying things—or sometimes alternate between one and then the other” (p. 105).  We need patriarchs.  Nothing else works.  It’s rooted in our nature as human beings.  No apologies!

Esolen brings to his discussion a deeply-informed knowledge of the West’s best literature.  Citing Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis enable him to draw upon the wisdom of our civilization in building his case for men.  He also writes as a committed Christian, knowing the truth revealed in creation as well as Scripture.  He’s off-ostracized for speaking the truth as he sees it—and he doubtlessly overstates some of his view—but he’s worth reading and heeding.  No apologies!