Marvin Olasky

Marvin Olasky is Christianity Today’s executive editor for news and global, and a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture. He edited WORLD magazine from 1992 to 2021 and was a professor, provost, chairholder, and dean at The University of Texas at Austin, The King’s College, Patrick Henry College, and the World Journalism Institute from 1983 to 2021. He is the author of 28 books including The Tragedy of American Compassion, Fighting for Liberty and Virtue, Abortion Rites, Reforming Journalism, and Lament for a Father.

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Dr. Olasky earned an A.B. from Yale University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1976. He was a Boston Globe correspondent and a Du Pont Company coordinator, and has written 5,000 articles for publications including World, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Fortune.

Dr. Olasky is a Presbyterian Church in America elder and has chaired the boards of City School of Austin and the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center. He has spoken on six continents and his writings have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Russian. He has been to 79 major league and spring training ballparks, all 254 Texas counties, and all three Delaware counties.

Marvin has been married for 45 years and has four sons, four daughters-in-law, and five grandchildren. He has been a foster parent, a PTA president, a cross-country bicycle rider, an informal advisor to George W. Bush, and a Little League assistant coach.

Archives

August is for Augustine

_{Olasky Books August 2025}_{Marvin Olasky
August 9, 2025}

This month is named after the emperor Augustus, but I’d rather think of it as a month for Augustine, the saintly theologian who died almost 1600 years ago. Augustine’s City of God, 1300 or so pages in modern translations, is a lot to lug to a desk, so I recommend Gregory Lee’s The Essential City of God: A Reader and Commentary (Baker, 2025). Only 445 pages, including short essays about the classic, it helps us to absorb Augustine’s central theme: Christians should love the eternal over the temporal, and in doing so contribute to the peace of the earthly city. The great thinker constructed the book as he went on, so it’s a cathedral with many side chapels in which tourists readily get lost. Lee helps us make it to the altar and absorb Augustine’s political and …

Marvin Olasky on the Humanity of Homeless Persons

_{Wesley J. Smith and Marvin Olasky
July 15, 2025}

Homelessness has become a crisis in the United States. We live in the richest country in the world, and yet one can drive down main thoroughfares of our most prosperous cities and be confronted with tent encampments lining streets, squalor, open-air drug markets, and destitute people begging. The crisis is multifaceted as it is seemingly intractable. What is the role of mental illness? What about drug addiction? Is the rising cost of housing part of the problem, and if so, what can be done about it? What protections does society owe these vulnerable people based simply on their humanity and what responsibilities, if any, do they owe to greater society to help themselves? The problems seem so unsolvable that it is tempting to throw up one’s hands in despair. But …

Spellbound by Einstein, Stevenson, and Trump

_{Olasky Books July 2025}_{Marvin Olasky
July 12, 2025}

This summer I’ve read two ambitious books that succeed, two that partly succeed, and an unpretentious one that holds true to its roots. Let’s start with Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum, 2025). Molly Worthen walks us through four centuries of mystery history: Some leaders gain followers by charm but charisma is more powerful, and sometimes rational explanations for their success fall short. Worthen’s writing itself is charming. She punctures the arrogance of early 20th century psychological rationalists: “A reasonable observer might have concluded that these men had captured the Holy Spirit. If they had not shot and mounted the Spirit as a trophy, at least they caged him for close observation. That impression was …

Summer beach novels

_{Olasky Books June 2025}_{Marvin Olasky
June 14, 2025}

Is anything new under the sun except books? My own preference by oceans and lakes is for books that raise energy levels. Others prefer calming waves. So here are two of the former and two of the latter. Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway (Viking, 2024) shows the power of DNA. Harkaway is the son of masterful British spy novelist David Cornwall, better known by his John le Carre pen name, and if I didn’t know the latter died five years ago I’d think he was still scribbling away—but by all accounts, this is all son. Fans of the father will remember the overall ethos of the 1960s/1970s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and “the Smiley Trilogy,” which Harkaway admirably upholds through murmurings like this one from George Smiley, explaining his resignation: “I realized I’d …

Farewell

_{Marvin Olasky
May 30, 2025}

After writing weekly for three years, this is column #156 and my last in Fix Homelessness. Three conclusions: “Housing First” is profoundly inhumane. Encouraging people to commit suicide by enabling their addiction — now you can drug and drink in privacy — is wrong. All drugs are not the same. People can live with a weed habit. People die with a meth habit or years of alcoholism. When addiction incapacitates a person, the right principle is Deal With Addiction First. The same principle goes for mental illness. Freedom’s not another word for no thinking left to lose. When a person goes from muttering to himself to hearing his own muttering plus voices yelling at him, it’s not kind to leave him alone. When medication can help as it often does, any …

Cereal or Eggs?

_{Marvin Olasky
May 23, 2025}

“Morning by morning new mercies I see.” That line from the hymn written in the 1920s, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” summarizes not only the Christian life but the way some beaten-down humans suffering homelessness come to believe that God can change their lives — or at least they can improve their own lives by moving from cereal (morning by morning) to bacon and eggs. “Bird by bird, buddy.” In the 1990s, Annie Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, a book about becoming a writer. The title comes from the time her ten-year-old brother fought frustration while trying to finish a report on birds that he’d struggled over for three months. “My father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, …

Two Memorable People and Why I Never Accept the First Explanation

_{Marvin Olasky
May 16, 2025}

Several readers have asked me what I’ve learned from interviewing homeless people during my stays in shelters. Hmm. One book about health care costs features this title: “Never Pay the First Bill.” I’ve encountered exceptions, but if we hope to be both compassionate and constructive, our rule should be, “Never Accept the First Explanation.” I tried to stay at shelters for at least four days. In Missouri, 32-year-old Mirenda (that’s her real name, and she specified that the fourth letter is an “e”) said on day one that she was homeless because of the foster care system. That system was clearly a problem for her, as it is for many kids bounced from house to house. Eight different placements is average, so it’s not surprising …

Three kinds of secularism, three critiques of centralism

_{Olasky Books May 2025}_{Marvin Olasky
May 10, 2025}

Thomas Howard’s Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History (Yale University Press, 2025) brilliantly flips the meme summarized by Christopher Hitchens in the title of his 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I debated Hitchens that year and offered examples of Christian compassion that should have pushed him off absolutism, but he was adamant: “Everything.” Howard, though, shows how extreme secularism poisons societies. Howard helpfully distinguishes among three kinds of secularism: passive, combative, and eliminationist. “Passive” is what the First Amendment offers: The national government should not favor any particular religion nor interfere with citizens’ free exercise of faith, unless it’s faith in killing or injuring …

My Confession and Plea

_{Marvin Olasky
May 9, 2025}

As I prepare to bring this series of weekly columns to a close after three years, I think back to 1989 when I started to research three centuries of American poverty-fighters. I wrote about them in a 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, that became the historical basis for the “compassionate conservatism” popularized by Texas Governor George W. Bush, whom I informally advised (and still like). The project fizzled during his presidency, ground down by Washington politics but also by some internal realities. Regarding help for those sunk into long-term homelessness, two of my notions proved inadequate. First, in promoting “compassionate conservatism” I emphasized the literal meaning of “com-passion”: with suffering. My goal was for the …

Why Work Works

_{Marvin Olasky
May 2, 2025}

Bob Coté, the homeless man turned homeless shelter pioneer whom I wrote about last month, used to say, “Work works.” By that he meant not only that work brings in money but also that it brings purpose and community. Paul the apostle also spoke about helping others: Do something useful with your hands, he wrote in Ephesians 4:28. Paul’s injunction to church members was strong: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ…we give you this rule: ‘If man will not work, he shall not eat.’ We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:6, 10). Paul did not make exceptions for the class of suffering …

Homeless Does Not Mean Helpless

_{Marvin Olasky
April 25, 2025}

Sticking a homeless person into an apartment without requiring anything from him is a bad idea not only because idle hands often turn to drugs, alcohol, or other mischief. It’s also a bad idea because not requiring work that a person can do is treating him as sub-human. Here it’s important to understand the biblical concept of labor, both before and after the traumatic events in the Garden of Eden. If work were something that had to be done only because of man’s sin and fall from grace, then we would be right to treat it as something to be endured only until “Miller time” arrives — but Genesis 2:15 (pre-fall) tells how “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Adam had a good combination …

Good Friday Reminds Us to Suffer With the Homeless

_{Marvin Olasky
April 18, 2025}

Today is Good Friday. Nearly two thousand years ago it seemed a very bad Friday. Jesus, as the Apostles Creed puts it, “was crucified, died, and was buried.” God turned bad into good, as He regularly does. Romans 5:8 in the New Testament declares, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Christians are supposed to get used to bad/good Fridays. Communist-turned-Christian Whittaker Chambers wrote, “a man can scarcely call himself a Christian for whom the crucifixion is not a daily suffering.” The idea of “suffering with” homeless people and others in danger (the literal meaning of compassion) is central in Christianity because it was central in the life of Christ. It’s humiliating to be …

East of Eden and Easter

_{Olasky Books April 2025}_{Marvin Olasky
April 12, 2025}

Eight days from now comes the most controversial day of the year. Easter bunnies and eggs (if you can afford the latter) mask the debate, but Gary Habermas jumps into it in On the Resurrection: Refutations (B&H Academic, 2024). Unlike other books that merely assert what the Gospels say, Habermas painstakingly undermines one by one the arguments that Jesus was not resurrected. This month on Olasky Books I’ll go two by two: Two biographies of my favorite singers show how to write about others—and how not to. Two stories about early American history remind us that political vice has always been with us, and that the antidote is not groaning but growing our minds and hearts. Two more books rightly elevate virtue over “choice,” two examine the medical mystery that gives …

Warm-Hearted, Tough-Minded Compassion: An Interview with Bob Coté

_{Marvin Olasky
April 11, 2025}

Next month I’ll lay out my upcoming book on homelessness, but the book will only make sense if you understand the process of Step 13 and Springs Rescue Mission that I’ve laid out in this first quarter of the year — so here’s part of an interview I did with Bob Coté 16 years ago. Olasky: Does the step-by-step process to moving upstairs and getting a better room really work? Coté: They want to get up there. I have 12 full-time employees, but really I have 52, because I have 40 people with a year or even two years of residence and they take ownership of Step 13. They’ll say, “Hey, we don’t write on the walls here,” and the one time they did, I nailed all the bathrooms shut and told them to walk to the Greyhound Station. Olasky: Nailed …

Zenger Prizes: Honoring Good Reporting on Helping the Homeless

_{Marvin Olasky
April 9, 2025}

Three years ago, I began writing my Human Lives column about homelessness on the Discovery Institute website. I’ll be concluding that series at the end of next month, but I’d like Discovery Institute supporters to know about some prizes announced today that will hearten those concerned about journalism, homelessness, or both. Over the years, The New York Times editorially has supported neither Intelligent Design nor the intelligent design of programs to help homeless individuals. Nor is the Times accustomed to getting awards from Christian organizations — but Christian groups that fight homelessness are equally unaccustomed to getting positive stories in the Times. That’s why a story by reporter Jason DeParle four days before Thanksgiving last year was …

Remembering a Pioneer: Bob Coté

_{Marvin Olasky
April 4, 2025}

This year I’ve written about what I learned in Colorado Springs at the Springs Rescue Mission. But when I stayed there last year, I also thought of the pioneer who, starting in 1983, built a predecessor of SRM just up the highway in Denver. His name: Bob Coté, a six-foot-three-inch ex-amateur boxer who in his forties changed his life by not drinking his usual half gallon of vodka for lunch. Instead, he poured out the bottle’s contents and became in 1983 one of the original residents of a new program, Step 13. Bob became Director of Operation and then Executive Director, pouring what he had learned as a homeless alcoholic into a program that challenged rather than coddled men seen as hopeless. I met Bob in 1995 when his shelter on Larimer Street (two blocks from where …

Gimme Shelter — But What Kind?

_{Marvin Olasky
March 28, 2025}

Today’s biggest public policy error concerning homelessness emerges from the fallacy that everyone deserves his own apartment and that true compassion means providing one. The federal government’s “Housing First” mandate sits on the materialistic assumption that an apartment is the appropriate response to addiction, mental illness, loneliness, and purposeless living. Thirty-six years ago, I came out with a book entitled The Tragedy of American Compassion. It included seven ways to fight poverty in alphabetical order. The first two were Affiliation and Bonding: restoring social ties that were broken or weaving new ones. Many recent trends have battered affiliation and bonding, but they are still key. Falling into addiction instead of falling in love is a …

Dueling Definitions of Compassion

_{Marvin Olasky
March 21, 2025}

In the U.S. Capitol 30 years ago, on March 23, 1995, Rep. Glenn Poshard (D., Illinois) advocated for more federal spending for the poor and homeless. He said spending hundreds of billions on governmental poverty-fighting was not “wild-eyed liberalism systems that end up manipulating and controlling the poor, more than liberating them.” Instead, the expenditures were biblical, because “if there is one thing evident in the Scriptures, it is that God gives priority to the poor.” Poshard criticized conservative policy analysts by quoting Jesus “from the Sermon on the Mount. Time and again he says, ‘blessed are the poor.…When I was thirsty you gave me drink, when I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked you clothed me.…When you did it to the least …

Springs Rescue Mission: More Than Food and a Bed

_{Marvin Olasky
March 14, 2025}

The city of Colorado Springs does not want people sleeping on the streets and stealing or begging for food. The last IRS report 990 that Springs Rescue Mission (SRM) filed (April 2024) shows $5.6 million in food and shelter costs, with $2.2 million coming from governments and $3.4 million from private sources. Their overall income is a healthy $13.5 million. SRM does not owe its life to government, and it does not give beds and meals only to those who sit through a service or listen to a sermon. Part of the argument for city government supplementing the SRM budget comes down to dollars and cents. Colorado Springs spends about $57,000 annually per chronically homeless adult. SRM sees about 220 people a year move into some form of transitional or regular housing. That’s a …

Intelligent design and unintelligent use of power

_{Olasky Books March 2025}_{Marvin Olasky
March 8, 2025}

Rational people differ on Who God is or what gods are, but should we all believe that the world is the product of intelligent design? That’s what a smart New York columnist, a smart Roman essayist who died in 43 BC, and the smart Discovery Institute researchers who follow science, all contend. The new book, by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has the audacious title Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025). He covers scientific findings that show underlying order but also social and psychological ones that point to voids in culture, and in our own lives, when we choose to disbelieve. Douthat does all that in a calm tone that will appeal to all but the furiously dogmatic. The old book, by Marcus Tullius Cicero, is a bundling of two of his works (On the …