Marvin Olasky

Marvin Olasky is 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

Elliott’s “Invisible Child”: A Model of Narrative Non-Fiction

_{Marvin Olasky
October 4, 2024}

Sixty-six books have won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction since that award began in 1962. Two of the books — sociologist Matthew Desmond's Evicted (the 2017 winner) and journalist Andrea Elliott's Invisible Child (2022 Pulitzer) — portray people in and out of homelessness. I criticized Desmond's work last month: He communicated an unmodulated despair. Last week, though, I recommended E. Fuller Torrey's American Psychosis, and this week I want to recommend Invisible Child's nuanced hopefulness.

How Politicians Strafed the Cuckoo’s Nest

_{Marvin Olasky
September 27, 2024}

After criticizing some scholarly articles and books, I have three books to recommend. First, here’s a tribute to 86-year-old psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, author of American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System (Oxford University Press, 2013). I first met Torrey in 1989 and heard about what was going wrong. Thirty-five years later, it’s even clearer that the federal panaceas have not panned out. Torrey shows how local and state charities and governments cared for mentally ill individuals, sometimes poorly but often adequately, until 1940, by which time state mental hospitals housed 423,445 individuals. During World War II half of the hospitals’ professional staff members were in the armed forces. Torrey: “The …

Unaffordable Housing Not at the Root of Midwest Homelessness

_{Marvin Olasky
September 20, 2024}

I was critical of sociologist Matthew Desmond in my last two columns, but I do appreciate that he based his research in Milwaukee. The Midwest is often overlooked in discussions about homelessness. Journalists more often write about California, home to about half of all unsheltered homeless people in the U.S., and New York, flush with immigrants. “Housing First” became a familiar slogan partly because of journalistic near-sightedness: High housing prices in some coastal cities make it easy for coast-based reporters to argue that finances are central to the homelessness problem — but the middle of the country looks very different. Fact: 60 U.S. cities with more than 100,000 residents — many in the north central sector stretching from Buffalo to St. Louis — have …

Suspense, Unrest, Disaster, Confessions

_{Olasky Books September 2024}_{Marvin Olasky
September 14, 2024}

One recipe for a good book or movie: Place sympathetic characters facing personal difficulties within a large looming disaster. Think Casablanca, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Cypresses Believe in God. Joseph Kanon’s Shanghai (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is a terrific novel set in the Chinese city within a 1939 vortex of fascism and communism, sex and violence—and survival. Kanon, much like Philip Kerr and David Downing, captures the tension. Good historians also seek out tension. I wrote last month about Erik Larson’s excellent The Demon of Unrest, and three days from now another good book on the lead-up to our Civil War comes out. David S. Brown’s A Hell of a Storm (Scribner, 2024) shows how the political ambition of Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas led to the …

Desmond’s “Evicted”: A Condescending View of the Homeless

_{Marvin Olasky
September 13, 2024}

I summarized last week reviews of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, a book published in 2016 that uses Dickens-like characters and won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Two months ago, the New York Times even put Evicted in 21st place on its list of 100 books of the 21st century. A Chronicle of Higher Education writer called Desmond “sociology’s next great hope.” One problem, though, is that Evicted offers almost no hope. Based on my experience, I’d say that those who talk about personal causes of poverty and those who talk about structural/societal causes are both right: People are poor for both reasons, and the proportion varies from individual to individual, but I’ve never seen it 100% one way or the other way. Desmond, though, is an absolutist: Poor …

Dickensian Non-Fiction: Reviewing Desmond’s “Evicted”

_{Marvin Olasky
September 6, 2024}

The academic who’s gained the biggest rewards for writing about homelessness is Harvard and Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond. An above-average writer, Desmond received in 2015 a MacArthur “genius grant” of $625,000 and, following publication of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a 2017 Pulitzer Prize. The prize came with this explanation: “For a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty.” Desmond deserves credit for living in two poor areas of Milwaukee as he researched his book, but discredit journalistically because he mentions that “the names of tenants, their children, and their relatives, as well as landlords and their workers, have been …

Adverse Childhood Experiences: The ACEs You Don’t Want to be Dealt

_{Marvin Olasky
August 30, 2024}

Last week I reviewed academic research regarding homelessness and foster care from this century’s first decade. Scholars debated the circumstances within which people develop executive function: planning ahead and giving up immediate rewards for long-term benefits. How do people on long losing streaks avoid “learning helplessness,” the fatalistic sense that, regardless of what we do right, everything goes wrong? The consensus developed during the second decade is that ACEs (“adverse childhood experiences”) go wild: ACEs such as suffering abuse or neglect, witnessing violence in the home or community, or having a family member attempt or die by suicide, undermine senses of safety and stability. Substance use and mental health problems also deal ACEs. Many …

A Peruse Through Academic Journals on the Link Between Foster Care and Homelessness

_{Marvin Olasky
August 23, 2024}

As this century began, journalist Fred Barnes quoted four discouraging words found in some illustrious newspapers: “First of a series.” Journalist Mickey Kaus defined the typical newspaper series as a “bloated journalistic project driven by egos and internal institutional needs.” But one thing is even more discouraging than most newspaper series: a series of articles from academic journals. Nevertheless, here are some journal articles about the relationship between homelessness and foster care. One, by Heather Taussig in 2002 in Child Abuse and Neglect, had the scintillating title, “Risk behaviors in maltreated youth placed in foster care: A longitudinal study of protective and vulnerability factors.” Taussig noted that “for many maltreated …

Foster Care Children Too Often Become Homeless Adults

_{Marvin Olasky
August 16, 2024}

The Safe Families dinner and Rob Henderson memoir I wrote about last month got me thinking more about “the relationship between foster care and homelessness”: That’s the title of a paper delivered at a 1996 conference hosted by the American Public Welfare Association and based on client files and case data from 21 homeless service organizations located in every region of the United States. Of the 1,134 homeless individuals covered by the study, 36 percent had a foster care history. The paper’s authors, Nan P. Roman and Phyllis B. Wolfe, determined that “the foster care system can fail to deal adequately with problems caused by sexual abuse, physical abuse, or troubled or dysfunctional families — that is to say, with the very issues that often lead to …

Barbarous obliteration and invisible immortality

_{Olasky Books August 2024}_{Marvin Olasky
August 10, 2024}

Victor David Hanson’s The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation (Basic, 2024) has chapters on the destruction of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan that the author, or a good editor, should have abridged. Maybe the repetition, though, can drum into our heads a lesson we try to keep out: “Modern societies are not immune to the horror of a war of extinction,” and American society could also “descend into barbarism and obliteration.” After all, America sent about 750,000 bodies into obliteration between 1861 and 1865. Southerners could have accepted in 1861 the original thirteenth amendment, approved by both the House and the Senate, which guaranteed that slavery could continue in the states where it already existed. They refused. Why? Erik …

How Adverse Childhood Experiences Turn into Homelessness

_{Marvin Olasky
August 9, 2024}

Would you rather be rich or loved? Many of us might want to be both, but Rob Henderson, author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, understands what's most important: "For happiness, it's better to be poor and loved than rich and unloved."

Coming Out of Trouble

_{Marvin Olasky
August 2, 2024}

Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Gallery Books, 2024) is well worth reading. I’ll give you two reasons Henderson’s life and book are not exceptional, then two reasons why they are. 1. Sad to say, Henderson’s background does not make his book exceptional these days. Mother: drug addict. Father: nowhere in sight. Number of foster care placements: ten, more than the national average of seven or eight. Once a child gets past three he often lives with dread, the word Henderson says best summarizes his feelings while growing up and sliding down. He dreads “suddenly being moved somewhere else. . . . The dread was sharp — I’d see an unfamiliar car outside or a puzzled look on a foster parent’s face and …

The Foster-Care-to-Homelessness Pipeline

_{Marvin Olasky
July 26, 2024}

Earlier this month I wrote about the regular Wednesday dinners for unhoused humans at the University Avenue church. This week I'll write about a Friday night fundraising dinner in a church gym four miles further north. The beneficiary: Safe Families for Children of Austin — one of a hundred Safe Family chapters in 30 states that try to keep children from having the traumatic experiences that contribute to the psychology of homelessness.

Could Shared Housing Help Curb Homelessness?

_{Marvin Olasky
July 19, 2024}

This week I'm writing about an unconventional man mostly ignored, Michael Ullman. My January 13, 2023 column examined his work, which grows out of his 25 years of experience in managing and researching homeless services, and his hundreds of conversations with people living in shelters and on the streets. He is still rowing against the current with his National Homeless Information Project.

The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

_{Olasky Books July 2024}_{Marvin Olasky
July 13, 2024}

On July 4 we celebrated the rare revolution that worked. This page focuses on two wonderfully readable books about the mostly unsuccessful 17th century revolution that preceded America’s 18th century one, and the partly successful 19th century revolution that followed. Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 (Knopf, 2023) features vivid, specific detail. Some on the Puritan side who opposed any physical depiction of Jesus “used a statue of Christ for musket practice, cheering when they hit it in the face.” In London, Sir John Clotworthy used his halberd—an ax blade topped with a spike—to rip up a Rubens painting of the crucified Christ. That’s what happened to objects. Subjects—human beings—often had it worse. In the …

Community — Not Housing — First

_{Marvin Olasky
July 12, 2024}

Can people, laden with childhood traumas plus the hard experience of years of homelessness, overcome their pasts? On a Monday afternoon in May, I threw that question at Alan Graham, founder and CEO of Austin's Community First! Village (CFV), where close to 400 formerly homeless humans now live.

A Church Dinner for the Homeless

_{Marvin Olasky
July 5, 2024}

At 5:50 pm on a drizzly day in May, in the parking lot closest to the church's back entrance, backpacks held spots in line for the central Austin homeless who sat on a nearby patch of grass, waiting for dinner.

Homelessness is Exceptionally Hard to Solve

_{Marvin Olasky
June 28, 2024}

Sunrise pastor Mark Hilbelink said its navigation center last year helped more than 800 people get off the streets. Michael Busby was typical among those who benefited. He told the press that Sunrise staffers "helped me out a lot. They helped me restore my sanity. They help out with housing, they help out with medication, they keep your meds for you, and they give them out to you every day or every week."

Middle America Has a Lot to Teach us About Homelessness

_{Marvin Olasky
June 26, 2024}

In this episode, I’m joined by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Marvin Olasky who is the author of 29 books, the former editor of WORLD Magazine, and has spent the last year living in homeless programs across the U.S. to learn from the people living in them. We discuss the bias of West Coast journalism, what makes programs successful, and the stories of people Marvin has lived …

Not In My Backyard: When Serving the Homeless Clashes with Neighbors

_{Marvin Olasky
June 21, 2024}

Five miles southwest of "Church Under the Bridge" is Sunrise Community, a church that's part of everyday trench warfare against homelessness. At 11 am on Wednesday, May 22, 60 people (mostly in T-shirts and worn jeans, and carrying plastic shopping bags) waited patiently in two quiet lines. One line was for lunch: Two volunteers sat at a table handing out cups of cold water and plates of pizza and sandwiches. The other line was for everything else, including picking up ID cards and bus passes. One window was for getting mail — for thousands, it's their only address.