Marvin Olasky

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

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

Springs Rescue Mission: Spiritual Recovery Through Love, Not Force

A Springs Rescue Mission (SRM) document declares, “Our faith is why we do what we do, but faith is never required of others to receive basic relief services.…We believe it is God’s job to change people, not ours.” Old-style missions often thought they could change people by requiring attendance at chapel services. SRM does not have a campus church or any required service. SRM’s Christian statement emphasizes that God is “the one who transforms. Therefore, when guests make bad choices, it’s up to God to work with them. It’s God’s job to change people. It’s our role to help in the project, not own it.” Last March, though, The Gazette — Colorado Springs’ daily newspaper — reported criticism of SRM during public

Black History Month lesser-known stories

Olasky Books February 2025
Sixty thousand Union soldiers led by General William T. Sherman killed the Confederacy with their famous “March to the Sea” in 1864—but 20,000 enslaved blacks liberated themselves by marching with them. Bennett Parten’s Somewhere Toward Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2025) tells that often-neglected story and brings out emancipation excitement. Parten also reports disappointment as Reconstruction faltered, land-reform lagged, and Somewhere became Nowhere. Parten shows how the March from Atlanta to Savannah “evolved into a profound religious experience.” The formerly enslaved were “frantic with joy” at their “day of jubilee.” That thrill, along with their willingness to help foraging northern soldiers find where plantation masters had hidden food and valuables,

Springs Rescue Mission: A Rare Alliance Between Church and State

Two weeks ago I noted how Colorado Springs city officials a decade ago handed a $3 million federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant to Springs Rescue Mission (SRM) leaders. Later, City Hall gave $3 million more. That was because SRM, an explicitly Christian organization, was ready to help homeless wanderers in Colorado Springs, and no one else was ready. Strict church-state separationists didn’t like it, but city housing executive Steve Posey noted that the HUD Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) contract detailed public benefits: “SRM would build a commercial kitchen; they would build an overnight shelter for several hundred people; they would build a day center with showers and laundry facilities. Nowhere in those contracts, or any ongoing contracts for

Springs Rescue Mission: The Things They Carry

What is it like hanging around the Springs Rescue Mission (SRM) for several days? I wrote two weeks ago about its environment early in the morning. I’ll show now what it was like at 4:45 p.m. on a hot summer day. Ninety men and 29 women were lined up waiting to get into the air-conditioned dining hall. Most of the men had beards. Many of the women had leathery skin. Almost all were tattooed. The things they carried: Two enormous pillows, gigantic plastic bags, heavy blankets, spare pairs of sneakers — and almost everyone had a cell phone. (Medicaid provides free phones or tablets.) The T-shirts they wore: Just Do It. Never Too Much Bacon. The things some of them said: “I want dinner now,” “Don’t need this sh**,” “I don’t know when my

The Variety of Christian Homeless Missions

To understand why Springs Rescue Mission was so interesting to me, you should know something about the other three Christian homeless missions I have stayed at recently. Knowledgeable people call them model programs. That’s true, but each is different. The Orange County Rescue Mission (OCRM) in California is a beautiful place with an intensive, every-hour-occupied program in which individuals can advance over eighteen months or so from heavily regimented “freshman year” to a freer “senior year.” It’s perfect for men and women who are young enough and physically/mentally able enough to work again in the outside world. Eden Village in Springfield, Missouri is a beautiful strip of brightly-painted tiny houses in which beaten-down older people, some

Wednesday, 6:30 a.m. at Springs Rescue Mission in Colorado Springs

My columns over the next few weeks will become part of an eventual book, but before too long goes by, it’s time to describe how I spent part of my summer vacation in 2024. The summer prior, I had enjoyed the great beauty of the Colorado Springs area, including the Garden of the Gods, with its beautifully soaring red rock sandstone formations at 6,400 feet above sea level. It’s the number one park in the United States, according to Trip Advisor, but my Colorado Springs sojourn this past summer was on run-down Las Vegas Street. If the Garden hints at the glory of God, that street on a Wednesday at 6:30 a.m. proclaimed the wreckage of man. A grizzled wearer of a Mountain Dew T-shirt was slumped over. A man and a woman slept under a blanket next to needles, Budweiser cans, a

Transgenderism, Theology, and a Transfer of Power

Olasky Books January 2025
With the new administration that’s nine days away committed to revising rules regarding transgenderism, journalists reporting the debate should be informed biblically, biologically, and historically. J. Alan Branch’s Affirming God’s Image (Lexham Press, 2019) does well on all three dimensions in a tight 144 pages. Branch shows that participants in the ancient Roman cult of Cybele seemed to embrace transgenderism. The modern movement descends from the work of a German doctor in 1897 and an American endocrinologist in 1948. Soon came decades of attempts to find a biological rather than psychological explanation for sex-change desires, but no one has discovered a transgender gene. Much of the recent attention has been on athletes with male musculature participating in women’s

A Fistful of ACEs

An ideological war about homelessness is raging. Many on the right say substance abuse and mental illness cause homelessness. Many on the left emphasize the cost of housing. Those factors are real, but while living among and interviewing 80 men and women who had suffered long-term homelessness in Missouri, California, and Colorado, I learned more about what both sides underestimate: the impact of ACEs (“adverse childhood experiences”). ACEs include physical, sexual, or emotional abuse and other experiences that undermine any sense of safety and stability. Five out of six young homeless adults have been physically abused. Many have been sexually abused. Most have been otherwise neglected. Most homeless adults hold in their hands at least four ACEs, as the November 2022

Boats Against the Current

After writing weekly columns about homelessness for two-and-a-half years, I’m ready to put what I’ve learned into book form. It will be my 30th book and maybe my last, although (as chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes states) “of making many books there is no end.” But since I have written a lot, I’ll paraphrase the opening of the Declaration of Independence: “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires” that I declare the reason for writing a book on homelessness when a bunch already exist. Some of those books are by reporters who have lived with homeless people. Others are by opinion writers who have sat in their offices and proposed policies. The “unique selling proposition” of my book is that I meld personal experience with

Sentimentality vs. Compassion

I almost let 2024 slip away without a column about the 30th anniversary of The Homeless, an important book by scholar Christopher Jencks published in 1994. It included these sentences: "The homeless are indeed just like you and me in most respects. . . . But important as such similarities are, our differences are also important. To ignore them when we talk about the homeless is to substitute sentimentality for compassion."

In the Life of a Homeless Man

With Christmas coming, I’m taking a timeout from my usual columnizing to send greetings to Tony, a homeless man in Colorado. He is 67 years old and may be sleeping in a North Face sleeping bag within an abandoned 144-square-foot wooden structure adjacent to a cemetery. (His summer bed has been a picnic bench about a third of a mile from a Safeway/Starbucks.) Tony was born in Japan to a military dad. His family subsequently moved to Florida and then Arvada, a northwest suburb of Denver with a population that’s soared from 50,000 in 1970 to 124,000 now. When Tony was 16, he had some issues with his parents “just because I’m me,” and they sent him to a foster home 55 miles away. Tony returned home two years later but “it didn’t go well. . . .

Fiction and Conviction

Olasky Books December 2024
The Wall Street Journal stated, “Robert Harris is incapable of writing an unenjoyable book,” and that’s true in the present tense. Harris is in line to hit 70 in 2027 and at some point his skills will diminish, but now… wow, this former journalist with a love of history knows how to write, as his two most recent novels (both published by Harper) abundantly demonstrate. Act of Oblivion (2022) shows how two British Puritans instrumental in the execution of King Charles I in 1649 escaped to New England once Charles II took over in 1660 with a license to take vengeance. To make accurate history a page-turner, Harris invents a character determined for two decades to kill the Puritan army killers of his wife and the king. Nayler, the hunter, is as persistent as Victor Hugo’s

The Rarity of Homelessness in Judaism

After two years of learning about homelessness, next month I’ll start writing a book, with columns week by week showing chapter-by-chapter development. But before leaving my week-by-week miscellaneous approach, I want to mention that Christmas Eve this year is also the beginning of Hanukkah, an eight-day Jewish festival — and Jews are less likely to be homeless than non-Jewish Americans. That’s not a new phenomenon. Between 1880 and 1914, about 1.5 million Jews (including my grandparents) emigrated from czarist Russia to North America. They lived apart from the mainly Christian charity networks, yet observers at the time noted very little Jewish homelessness. Why? One reason: The deeply engrained work ethic within Jewish culture made a big difference. Another: Men needed

Gurteen and Lowell: Nineteenth Century Views on True Charity

Earlier this month I reported on Rebecca Gomez’s dissertation critique of “learned helplessness,” when young people — often with foster care backgrounds — feel like puppets who move only when others move them. When we go back 150 years, to the 1870s, we find similar concerns that led poverty-fighters then to distinguish between two other “p” words: “poor” and “pauper.” One Buffalo pastor, S. Humphreys Gurteen, said poverty was a problem, but an underlying cause was not material. He worried about the “concentrated and systematized pauperism which exists in our larger cities.” Gurteen wrote regarding “paupers” — those among the poor who had given up on working — that, “If left to themselves and

Jerry McAuley’s Nineteenth Century Homelessness Ministry

I mentioned last week the infamous Rat Pit in New York’s slums. Several Manhattan clergymen in 1868 rented it for two hours and tried to preach to the fans of battling rats. The New York Herald reported that the professionals preached over the heads of potential Water Street listeners: “What is wanted is a man of enthusiasm . . . rough language and homely bits of philosophy, who intuitively knows exactly the emotions which governs his hearers.” Answering that call was Jerry McAuley, the son of a counterfeiter who abandoned his family. McAuley’s mother, unable to control her son, sent him off to other relatives. At age 19 the riotous drunkard and local bandit went to the state penitentiary for highway robbery. There, McAuley attended gospel meetings and read the

The War on Homelessness 150 Years Ago

The advent of Thanksgiving brings more stories about homelessness and more debate about its causes. Some advocates emphasize housing costs, as New York’s Charles Brace did during the Civil War era (see my May 3, 2024 column.) Others emphasize substance abuse and mental illness. That also is nothing new: New York City suffered not only through draft and racist riots in 1863 but homelessness in the 1870s, often among Civil War veterans suffering from what today we call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. The debate, even then, was not new. Starting early in the century, the street-level analysis was that some poor people became paupers — not just poor, but distraught and defeated — by getting drunk and staying drunk. What percent of paupers were alcoholics? The verdict from

Eight History Books and Five Novels

Olasky Books November 2024
November, a month that culminates in Thanksgiving, is a good time to review history books—so let’s gallop through eight, starting with Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power (Knopf, 2024). Timothy Ryback weaves a story of betrayals, backroom deals, and one often-ignored aspect: the support Hitler received from dominant media. Publishing mogul Alfred Hugenberg thought the 1,600 newspapers he controlled would give him power by popularizing the dictator: “If Hitler sits in the saddle, then I will have the whip.” Early in 1933, the day after supporting Hitler at a make-or-break moment, Hugenberg told a friend, “I just made the biggest mistake of my life.” A year later the publisher, kicked out of the cabinet, saw his news agency absorbed by Hitler’s Propaganda

The Winding Path of Homeless Youth

Last week I wrote about Rebecca Gomez’s criticism of foster care. She accurately notes that “a large proportion of foster children will find themselves homeless upon exiting care. The majority do not attend college; do not have stable housing; do not obtain employment that provides a living wage; do not own a car; have never managed money.” Even if they’re not yanked from house to house, Gomez writes that foster children are “surrounded by treatment professionals including foster parents, case managers, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and special education departments. . . . They must gain the approval . . . to drive a car; take a trip out of state with their foster family; visit a sibling; participate in a contact sport; obtain medical care; be

The Aladdin Factor: Why Troubled Kids Fare Better Than Foster Kids

Aladdin, you may remember from the Disney movie, calls himself a "street rat" and knows how to survive amid homelessness. He is competent. He has "agency," the belief that he can act to improve his circumstances. That mindset is different from what former foster child Rob Henderson describes in his good memoir, Troubled.