We invite you to save the date for God’s Splendor in the Universe — the 12th Annual Westminster Conference on Science & Faith, scheduled for September 20–21, 2024 in the Philadelphia area. This 2-day conference will explore the finely-tuned design of the cosmos, the uniqueness of our solar system and planet, and implications on faith. Speakers will include philosopher Jay Richards Read More ›
American History teachers sometimes send me letters asking for advice about textbooks. I make suggestions — for example, Thomas Kidd’s American History (B&H, 2019) is a good main text to use — but also emphasize use of old newspapers to see how people in their own eras viewed important developments. As a teenager I started doing that on my own Read More ›
Recommendation of the month: If you want to learn about both black history and current opportunities for progress, read Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America (Emancipation Books, 2022). Authors Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher cover the free market tradition in Black America and the racist tradition that Jim Crow laws encapsulated. There’s no need Read More ›
It’s July and we’re ten days away from publication of a new Daniel Silva novel, so I’ll skip my mention of new books and recommend five authors who in six series have produced 73 novels since 1981. I’ve read three-fourths of them during the past decade and can testify to their excellence for beach, deck, armchair, or Kindle-when-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night bed reading, Read More ›
So much from the left (and also the right) is predictably roaring and boring. George Packer for two decades, though, has provided unexpected insights through his biting writing in The New Yorker and now The Atlantic. His Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) displays egalitarianism but does not accept the traditional left/right spectrum. Read More ›
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the independence of modern Israel. Few in 1948 thought it would last as long, surrounded as it was by a hostile Muslim world, now only partly hostile. The U.S. has been crucial in that survival, and Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish Read More ›
