Faith & Society

Editor’s note: This article first appeared at National Review Online.

‘Start the song already! It’s driving me crazy!” yelled my father from the living room after he lost patience with the gradually building, repetitive intro to Rush’s “Cygnus X-1 … More>

Jeff Bezos made an outlandish and seemingly illogical statement recently. No, it wasn’t in response to President Donald Trump’s assault on Amazon with reference to the U.S. Postal Service being short-changed. After speaking about his business philosophy, the origin of … More>

Our nation is experiencing an opioid crisis. Currently more than 2.5 million Americans are addicted to either opioid pain relievers or heroin. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid-related deaths have more than quadrupled since 1999. All … More>

I maintain a “Top 20” list of my favorite novels. According to my own rules, a book is not eligible for the list until I have reread it. Without comparison, my favorite is Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. Reading it was … More>

The public square is a hostile environment of competing identity politics. However, not all identities are treated equally. Those adhering to Christian orthodoxy do not enjoy the same respect, dignity, tolerance, or acceptance as other identities, despite the constitutional guarantee … More>

Adolescence was tough on me. I was a total geek, in an era before that was cool. I was a social misfit, totally uncomfortable in my high school setting. I worked out a deal with my parents and the school … More>

The story of Charlie Gard is sparking outrage throughout the world. As the Wall Street Journal put it, the doctors who are caring for 11-month-old Charlie Gard “have won judges’ permission to discontinue life support despite his parents’ objections, saying … More>

Rod Dreher’s new book “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in A Post-Christian Nation” (Sentinel, 2017) is an account of how, he says, America’s “culture wars” have ended. He thus suggests a way Christians can live in a post-Christian … More>

During Lent, the 46 days from Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter, many Christians focus on giving up or doing without something. Not eating a favorite food or drinking a preferred beverage is common. So is not participating in … More>

Have you ever struggled with what to do when you encounter a person on the sidewalk of a major city or standing at a busy traffic intersection with a cup in hand? Have you given such individuals money or been … More>

Don’t get me wrong. Churches are much more than just social clubs. Yet the evidence suggests that our churches need to be social clubs.

One of our concerns as Christian leaders and role models is the secularization of America. We … More>

After Katie Rich, a Saturday Night Live writer, tweeted last week that 10-year-old Barron Trump “will be this country’s first homeschool shooter,” she was widely lambasted on social media. Her inappropriate, insensitive remarks deserve to be widely denounced. No child … More>

Social media is used today for every purpose (and many of the posts are not particularly prosocial). Too many of the “news” stories have been slanted so far (sometimes to the right, and sometimes to the left) as to become … More>

It seemed like a good idea. Prepare a national news broadcast that parents can watch with their children without fear of trauma, nightmares, or lewdness. If I can watch the news with my children, then I have a natural opportunity … More>

People magazine recently reported news that a number of prominent fashion designers have refused to work with Melania Trump because they do not approve of her, or more likely, her husband’s politics and language. Given Donald Trump’s often offensive way … More>

Literature reviews are a common thing in the world of academic research. They often involve esoteric topics confined to a narrow universe of scholarly interest. Few literature reviews, however, have generated as much controversy as the recently published paper “Sexuality … More>

My heart aches over the stories I hear about heroin overdoses. Local fathers post stories about their sons and daughters, fatal victims of the heroin market. Police conduct raids. The illegal marketing demand continues to fund Afghanistan poppy farmers. Other … More>

Five score and two years ago, Robert Frost wrote “Mending Wall,” a poem seeking to extract wisdom from stony New England soil. It begins: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” While he didn’t have Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric … More>

HGTV has captured the attention of millions of devoted followers with its widely popular, “Fixer Upper,” a show about Chip and Joanna Gaines, a cowboy carpenter and his naturally beautiful designer wife in Waco, Texas. Chip and Joanna turn their … More>

Donald Trump, who has been leading the national polls for the Republican nomination since this past summer, has strong support among evangelicals. Given Trump’s beliefs, lifestyle, crude language, and some of his positions on issues, this is baffling. As Jonathan … More>

You may have heard about the Kentucky school district that ordered its administrators to scrub any religious references from its various Christmas productions. Most infamously, an elementary school in the Johnson County School District removed the lines from “A Charlie … More>

A few days before Christmas, I checked the schedule for Turner Classic Movies, one of the few TV channels I watch. I was looking for Christmas movies, maybe the 1938 Reginald Owen version of “A Christmas Carol” or something like … More>

In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus’s exploration of the role of suicide in the modern world, the philosopher of the Absurd states, “That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough … More>

In “Pleading Guilty,” best-selling novelist Scott Turow wrote, “What kind of ethical social system takes as its fundamental precepts the words ‘I’ ‘me’ and ‘mine’? Our two-year-olds start like that and we spend the next twenty years trying to teach … More>

I recently saw the documentary “3801 Lancaster: An American Tragedy.” I went home and cried. I don’t mean tears of joy. No, I cried.

The last time I cried was when my dad died. The last time before that … More>

Don’t you love it when something heartwarming happens to you unexpectedly? That happened to me on October 1. My friend Ron invited me to go with him to Cleveland to see the game that night between the Indians and the … More>

Amidst a plethora of sensational news reports elbowing each other to seize first place in America’s national consciousness, there is a story that has lurked beneath media radar that teaches us much more about the status of our country than … More>

Increasingly, we often expect each other to be smartphone-available nearly 24/7. Or we act as if this is the case.

Over time, this can lead to feelings of exhaustion and a sense of entrapment. Time to just focus on our … More>

While papal visits to the United States are increasingly common, what is uncommon is to see political-ideological battle lines drawn around a pope. The tendency this time is especially acute among liberals, who eagerly frame Francis as one of them—a … More>

Margaret Sanger is a saint in the feminist church. She is a charter member of the progressive hall of fame. Liberals revere this woman who preached “race improvement” and denounced what she called “human weeds,” “morons,” “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and the … More>

A pastor friend of mine, not trying to be irreverent or sacrilegious, once shared with me his own faint analogy of eternal hell—waking up every day and discovering yet again that it was moving day. I know that some will … More>

“I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.”

So declared Larry Flynt, founder of the Hustler magazine empire that has made millions photographing nude women. Flynt proffered his enthusiastic endorsement in an interview with Bloomberg.

Flynt’s endorsement of Mrs. Clinton, a … More>

A recent profile of Justice Anthony Kennedy begins with this: “The Irish Catholic boy who came of age in Sacramento after World War II is an unlikely candidate to be the author of the Supreme Court’s major gay rights rulings. … More>