A new anthology of essays, After DEI? A Theological Exploration, has just appeared. It is a slim volume comprising a dozen readable chapters. Contributors include Erik Varden and Mark Lilla. Our goal in this essay is simply to pique readers’ interest in the collection. 

For a few years, the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were a source of explicit partisan division in the United States. Then, the DEI label fell out of favor in light of concerns about the fairness of programs and policies being advanced under it. Some institutions gutted DEI programs and personnel. Others rebranded DEI programs without changing their substance. But most institutions are navigating a middle course, seeking to replace DEI—and what it represents—with a fairer, less divisive, and more effective set of values. 

That is where this volume comes in. Instead of merely defending or attacking DEI, the volume pursues the more difficult, but ultimately more fruitful, tasks of reconciliation and moral reconstruction. Siding with neither “camp,” it asks why DEI proved divisive and what a better framework might look like. Along the way, it engages irenically with DEI supporters and critics, presenting their views fairly and addressing them substantively.  

The volume’s most important and unique feature is its Christian theological lens. The book assumes little, save that truth is real and coherent, and that the Christian intellectual tradition offers underutilized resources for thinking about diversity, equality, inclusion, belonging, and related values such as justice, charity, and friendship. Its goal is not to argue for Christianity or belief in God, but to show how religious perspectives can provide valuable insights, point toward shared commitments and common objectives, and help to break the partisan impasse that burdens American politics.  

Read it all.

After DEI: A Theological Exploration(Grows out of the "Beyond the Impasse" conference of the Aquinas Institute at Princeton in October 2024) https://t.co/ciP2G63Osz

— Josh Hochschild (@JoshHochschild) October 3, 2026

Evangelical and Inclusive is a very important resource for anyone wanting to think about the present and possible future of the Church of England because it sets out the stall of the Inclusive Evangelicals group in a very clear fashion. If you want to know what Inclusive Evangelicals stands for, read this book.

However, for the reasons set out above, Evangelical and Inclusive is not a book that makes a persuasive case for conservative evangelicals (or anyone else) abandoning the Church of England’ s traditional position regarding marriage and human sexuality. Furthermore, for a book of essays by network of people who think of themselves as ‘inclusive,’ the collection is surprisingly exclusive as far as conservative evangelicals are concerned (hence the title of my review).

The big issue facing the Church of England in the five years of the next General Synod will be how those with conservative and inclusive  views regarding marriage and human sexuality can co-exist within the Church of England in a way that enables both sides to remain true to their convictions.

No one in this collection addresses this issue.  In so far as they touch on the future of the Church of England, they seem to see it in exclusively inclusivist terms. By contrast, the proposal for a provincial level settlement made by CEEC and the Alliance acknowledges that provision will need to be made within the Church of England for those taking an inclusive position and proposes a way for this to happen that would enable both conservative and inclusive Anglicans to teach and practice their own beliefs about marriage and human sexuality within their own provinces while still recognising each other as Christians and still being part of a single, albeit internally differentiated, Church of England.

This is a truly inclusive proposal, in the sense that it makes proper provision for everyone, so why aren’t inclusive evangelicals prepared to discuss it?

Read it all.

Martin Davie–Exclusively inclusive? – A review of David Runcorn (ed) Evangelical and Inclusive https://t.co/dUqs0RK3KZ ‘Evangelical and Inclusive is not a book that makes a persuasive case for conservative evangelicals (or anyone else) abandoning the Church of England’ s traditional position regarding marriage and human sexuality. Furthermore, for a book of essays by network of people who think of themselves as ‘inclusive,’ the collection is surprisingly exclusive as far as conservative evangelicals are concerned’ [book cover $AMZN] #theology #books #anthropology #sex #ethics #21stc #anglican

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) October 16, 2026

Almighty God, who didst plant in the heart of thy servants William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale a consuming passion to bring the Scriptures to people in their native tongue, and didst endow them with the gift of powerful and graceful expression and with strength to persevere against all obstacles: Reveal to us, we pray thee, thy saving Word, as we read and study the Scriptures, and hear them calling us to repentance and life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

5 Oct 1535, Miles Coverdale (1488-1569) published first authorised English translation of Bible. He drew on work of the martyred William Tyndale. In 1539, he helped with Great Bible, so called due to its size. This was #Bible Henry VIII ordered be placed in every parish church. https://t.co/D9WYMW3uKu

— Revd Nicholas Pye (@RevdPye) October 5, 2026

This project was motivated and shaped by Tyndale’s theology. At its heart is the belief that God reveals himself through scripture. God is not “man’s imagination” — something that we can create in our own minds — but “only which he saith of himself. . . God is but his word: as Christ saith.” Through scripture, God reveals himself to us.

In Tyndale’s time, scripture was read in Latin. For those who could not understand Latin, the meaning of the Bible needed to be mediated by a priest, according to the authorised teaching of the Church. But this presented a problem. If the Bible is in a language that ordinary people do not understand, how can ordinary people come to know God? Translating the Bible into English breaks down this barrier, giving all people the freedom to read about God for themselves and, crucially, to develop a personal faith.

Inspired by the reforming ideas that were sweeping across Europe, Tyndale deliberately chose, in his translation, words that reflected new ways of understanding personal faith and the Church. Rather than “penance”, he chose “repentance”; “church” became “congregation”; and “priest” became “elder”. He even wrote that “the blessing of a baker that knoweth the truth, is as good as the blessing of our most holy father the Pope” (William Tyndale, Selected Writings, edited by David Daniell; Fyfield Books, 2003).

So, Tyndale’s theology, reflected in his translation, challenged the traditions, structures, and authorised teaching of the Western Church.

Read it all.

James Roberts celebrates 500 years of a publication that changed the world https://t.co/Ivja0uIu3L pic.twitter.com/mV0LZr6Nle

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) October 2, 2026

In short, The Death of Religion? insists that religion is not dying; it’s merely changing. Christianity may be declining in the West but it’s growing elsewhere. “The fastest-growing areas of Christianity are in the Global South,” the authors state, “particularly sub-Saharah Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.” For those who are Christians, this is an important reminder that the work of God continues throughout the world, with Christianity continuing to advance in many places—and this is reason to celebrate.

In fact, Johnson and Kidd project that Pentecostals will continue to experience significant growth and may surpass a billion adherents by 2050, asserting that in this competitive religion economy, these are the groups that have managed to thrive. And while there are good reasons to criticize the consumeristic mindset of some Christian groups, “at some basic level, churches still have to account for congregants’ perceived needs.” Pentecostal congregations, apparently, do just that.

The authors acknowledge, however, that “the most salient story of Christian decline in American history has been the shocking collapse of the mainline denominations since the 1960’s.” They discuss the decline of several different denominations in American and around the world. The Methodist church, for example, has been deteriorating in the U.S. since the 1960s, but globally the denomination is doing very well. The Episcopal Church has a similar story. The denomination has not died yet, but “it is about as close to death as a well-heeled, historically influential denomination can get in contemporary America.” But like Methodism, the worldwide Anglican church, of which the Episcopal Church in America is but one part, appears to be growing in the Global South, and conservative Anglicans have formed new denominational structures such as the Anglican Church in North America that are trying to partner with like-minded groups around the world.

Read it all.

Is religion dying?

It's easy to think so, but the story is more complicated.

A new book by sociologist Byron Johnson and historian @ThomasSKidd argues that the decline of religion has been greatly overstated. @sopresley reviews "The Death of Religion?" and explores why… pic.twitter.com/qXrsphf7TQ

— Acton Institute (@ActonInstitute) September 30, 2026

The title of James Patterson’s and Thomas Howes’s book Why Postliberalism Failed is not inspired by a belief that the contemporary American postliberal movement (made most famous in Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed) has collapsed. Quite the contrary: the authors believe that, in spite of an apparent retreat of postliberalism, the movement continues to influence contemporary American political discourse. Indeed, people who have publicly endorsed it (and who continue to defend postliberal positions) are in positions of the highest power in the U.S. government. All the more reason, Patterson and Howes argue, to understand what makes postliberalism tick. 

The authors helpfully summarize the whole postliberal platform (not just its integralist wing, the subject of Kevin Vallier’s excellent book All the Kingdoms of the World), which is diffused throughout hundreds of articles, social media posts, and several books. Postliberals reject liberalism’s protection of individual liberty as a precursor to communism, atheism, and other ills; they instead “advocate for restoring a divinely ordained hierarchy, with the Church providing spiritual rule and the state political rule.” (In theory the state submits to the Church if the two bodies disagree.) Demoting individual freedom means centrally organizing the economy (“in collaboration with state-approved guilds or cartels”) and concentrating all political power in a unitary executive that governs through bureaucracy (hence many postliberals’ sympathy for China’s present government). Unlike conservatives, who (out of respect for everyone’s freedom and dignity) try to effect political change through constitutional processes, postliberals employ cultural Marxist tactics, “us[ing] political power to reward their friends and crush their enemies.” They accept the administrative state and seek to populate it with their own numbers, “put[ting] that bureaucracy to work providing a kind of right-wing welfare state.” Whereas progressives use federal bureaucracy to advance sexual liberationism, many postliberals would use it to advance patriarchy. Finally, postliberalism rejects America’s responsibility for helping to uphold the law of nations; the United States should be neutral in all global conflicts, they say, even if that means allowing stronger countries to annex weaker ones. 

One of the book’s greatest achievements is to show in detail the similarity between contemporary postliberal theory and dozens of regimes that have actually existed in relatively recent history (although not in the memory of young postliberals), all of which failed to usher in the Christian society they promised (hence the book’s title). Contemporary postliberalism is not a discovery made by the American New Right in the last two decades; postliberalism has been a constant temptation of Western conservatives, especially religious ones, at least since the French Revolution. We’ve been through all this before, and it has always ended badly. 

Read it all.

John Doherty of @WitherspoonInst reviews @ThomasDHowes and @McGillPatterson’s Why Postliberalism Failed @PublicDiscourse — https://t.co/ME7aLT2aOF

— Matt Franck (@MatthewJFranck) September 24, 2026

For the First World War, he analyses three poets: Rupert Brooke, for whom the war was relief from an empty life, void of meaning; then Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote: “I died in hell — (They called it Passchendaele)”; and finally, Wilfred Owen, who in his “Anthem for Doomed Youth” wrote of “these who die as cattle”. The Second World War with the death of millions, the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the obscenity of death by atomic bomb — all of this undercut Christian moral and social values based on the faith. Existential angst and helplessness replaced churchgoing.

The 1960s brought massive social and technological challenges, which eroded support for the Church. Hayward describes how faith became to be regarded as the past, not the future. There was a widespread loss of trust in all institutions. Football came to replace church as the centre of community. For Hayward, the final critical event was when the churches were closed when they were most needed, in the pandemic.

Ironically, Hayward wisely sees that the pandemic and the lockdown gave the Church a chance to reset. People had space and silence to ask themselves what life was for, what their life was. People started to go on Alpha courses, return to church on Sundays, become interested in spirituality, not just religion, feel a deep need to care for the poor, needy, the homeless, and to look again to Jesus Christ and his teaching. Hayward gently concludes that when a tide goes out, the tide flows back, perhaps even more powerfully.

Read it all.

📙 Review: Lyle Dennen considers a hopeful commentator #BookReviews #ChurchTimes https://t.co/mwQx2fQF7E

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 22, 2026

there’s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper. The personal computers of the 1980s gave us word processing, making the typewriter obsolete; the early internet of the 1990s gave us email (I remember thinking that this was reviving the lost art of letter writing that had been killed by the telephone); and by the turn of the century the bounty promised by the web looked truly impressive: digitized books and primary sources for research, online journals, a proliferation of news and commentary. (Yes, also the logorrhea of early blog culture, now reappearing on Substack.) Then came the smartphone, the jazziest (though not the first) being the iPhone, debuting in 2007. Now in the hands of billons worldwide, these devices have fundamentally changed our daily lives, for good and for ill. They are designed to seize and keep our attention, to amuse us endlessly with ever-changing stimuli, and to lure us into an in-the-cloud world that contains much of the human race’s knowledge yet also makes us dumber. As Wolf writes: 

No self-respecting internal review board at any university would allow a researcher to do what our culture has already done with no adjudication or previous evidence: introduce a complete, quasi-addictive set of attention-compelling devices without knowing the possible side effects and ramifications for the subjects (our kids). 

What we are all experiencing—and Wolf confesses her personal struggle to return to deep reading of books—are “decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge.” 

Convinced that consistent, attentive reading is essential for the development of both our reason and our compassion, Wolf is worried about the effects of our contemporary screens on our capacity for self-government. This is even more explicitly the concern of British writer James Marriott, a journalist at The Times. Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society has been out for a few weeks in the UK, and is soon to be published here in the U.S. (This one, dear reader, I acquired on paper from the publisher.) 

Marriott is a worried man, and he works hard not to be too alarmist—to use his indoor voice, as it were. But The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: “As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.” We fill our eyes (and now increasingly our ears, too) not with the pages of books or even with the extended narratives and arguments to be found in newspapers and magazines, but instead with TikTok and YouTube videos, podcasts, X memes, Instagram posts, and Reddit rants.  

Read it all.

“As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.”https://t.co/1igjBHxPox

— Jordan J. Ballor (@JordanBallor) September 21, 2026

Peter Green’s translation of the Odyssey keeps Homer’s repeated epithets and formulaic phrases fully intact. Achilles remains “swift-footed” whether he is fighting or sitting in his tent. Green’s English is plain and meant to be read aloud; he preserves the repeated epithets and formulaic phrases precisely because the repetition itself is part of the point. Read Green and you will hear “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn” exactly as Homer repeated them. 

Robert Fagles took the opposite approach. Uncomfortable with straight repetition, he worked to make the epithets contribute to the drama of each moment. Where Homer has Hector carry his “shining helmet” unchanged from line to line, Fagles makes the helmet flash repeatedly, until the device starts to feel more like a cinematic lighting effect than a Homeric formula.  

More recently, Emily Wilson made the choice consciously rather than instinctively. She explained to the Chicago Review of Books that repetition means something different depending on who is listening: in Homer’s oral culture, repetition signaled that something is important and worth listening to and remembering. Back in 2017 she shared in that same interview her belief that in a literate culture like ours, the same repetition reads instead as unimportant, something to skip. She therefore chose to preserve the feeling of Homer’s repetition through variation, rather than reproduce the exact words. Dawn still appears as often as she does in the Greek, and each appearance keeps the recurring imagery of roses, flowers, pinkness, fingers, and newness, but the phrasing changes from occurrence to occurrence. 

Wilson has since reconsidered that decision. After finishing her Iliad and living longer with the Homeric material, she returned to the Odyssey and began an entirely new translation. In a March 2026 talk at the University of Iowa titled “Realms of Gold: Re-translating Homer in the Twenty-First Century,” and in subsequent interviews, she has said that her experience has changed her understanding of repetition: she now sees more clearly how repeated phrases create patterns across the poem and help readers recognize connections between scenes. She is allowing herself more lines and syllables than in the first version precisely so that more of those repetitive elements can remain. The fact that she is willing to redo one of the most successful and widely read translations of the last decade because of this shift is rare and revealing. 

Read it all.

Homer Against the Attention Economy – Public Discourse
https://t.co/X74jw8MZ7O

— rogueclassicist ~ david meadows (@rogueclassicist) September 11, 2026

God of peace, who didst call John Bunyan to be valiant for truth: Grant that as strangers and pilgrims we may at the last rejoice with all the faithful in thy heavenly city; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

If my life is fruitless it doesn’t matter who praises me. And if it’s fruitful it doesn’t matter who criticizes me.

—John Bunyan pic.twitter.com/T4cXL0DjiN

— Puritan Gold (@PuritanGold) September 22, 2025

“Biological War” is a heavily researched book about contagious and potentially civilization-ending pathogens. Though banned by international treaty, these germs have been weaponized and hoarded by countries that include Russia, North Korea and Syria.

By “weaponized” I don’t mean merely that they’ve been placed at the business end of ballistic missiles. I mean that these pathogens have been genetically engineered, in diabolical ways, to trick first responders and be all but untreatable. Even a small accidental spill, like wine sloshing out of glass, like Covid slipping out of a lab, could be the last mistake our species makes.

Jacobsen has interviewed everyone, from former high-ranking members of the military, the C.I.A., FEMA and NATO to former secretaries of defense, counterterrorism experts, epidemiologists and Sam [expletive] Altman. That so many were willing to talk to her, and have their names affixed to this book, indicates the esteem in which she is held, especially after the publication of “Nuclear War: A Scenario” (2024), a best seller that stirred new interest in nuclear policy, technology and risks worldwide.

The reason “Biological War,” like Jacobsen’s previous book, is so consuming is that she packs a lot of dense and particulate information into a ticking-clock scenario: into a story. It’s more pulverizing than a Kathryn Bigelow movie. Some of the chapter headings are phrases like “Day Two” or “Day Three.” Not to ruin your mood, but “Day Six” is about as far as civilization gets. A later chapter is titled “The Last Day of American Democracy.”

Read it all.

New, likely terrifying look into reality of biological warfare, book by @AnnieJacobsen just arrived. All her books are must-reads… Nuclear War, Area 51, Surprise Kill Vanish, Operation Paperclip, etc pic.twitter.com/qLmZNPoEu4

— Luke Fischer (@lukefischer) July 28, 2026

-‘All around us we see Christians and churches relaxing their grasp on the gospel, fumbling it, and in danger of letting it drop from their hands altogether’

–John R. W. Stott, Guard the Gospel (Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 1973),

Today's centenary of birth of John Stott, an evangelical Anglican clergyman named by @Time among 100 most influential people. As member of @AllSoulsLP, 1981-84, his preaching, humility & founding of @liccltd had massive impact on my Christian formation. (photo @LanghamPartners ) pic.twitter.com/lQE4k2K9Ax

— Revd Nicholas Pye (@RevdPye) April 27, 2021

A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists. Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in The Free Press, a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board “openly identifies with communist ideology.”

As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they’re claiming? With Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police’s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia’s population?

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.

The God That Failed brought together several prominent European and American writers who had once either been members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but had eventually grown disillusioned. Each writer explained what initially attracted him to, and what eventually repelled him from, communism. The star-studded cast included Arthur Koestler, an Hungarian-born British writer now best known for his brilliant novel about communism, Darkness at Noon; French novelist André Gide; the Italian Ignazio Silone, author of Bread and Wine; British poet Stephen Spender; and two Americans, journalist and author Louis Fischer, and African American writer Richard Wright.

Read it all.

The Return of the God That Failed https://t.co/Z9aUNSWmTy

— Collin Hansen (@collinhansen) July 27, 2026

Patristics, theology, and right sense in public discourse lost a giant. On June 6 of this year, Robert Louis Wilken passed from this life at the age of eighty-nine. He leaves behind his beloved wife of sixty-six years, Carol, their family and loved ones, and many admirers who know him through his books. 

Before he was a prolific author, Robert was an avid reader. He loved books. In an act of great generosity, he emailed me on April 29, 2022: “The time has come to dispose of my library. Is it possible that the Dominican House of Studies would be interested?” My Pontifical Faculty at the House of Studies in Washington, DC was very glad to receive well over 1,500 books and other library materials from him. I told the librarians that if they saw underlining and marginalia inscribed in the books, they should realize that the books were made even more valuable. Those scribbles were the marks of Robert Wilken! 

Robert’s life traces a fascinating intellectual and spiritual journey. Raised in a devout Lutheran family, he wanted at a young age to go into ministry. After attending a Lutheran prep school in Texas, Robert went to Concordia Seminary in St. Louis where he studied under his early mentor, Arthur Carl Piepkorn. Piepkorn himself had done doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, and Robert followed his example. Robert became not only a Lutheran pastor, but also a well-trained professor specializing in the Fathers of the Church. In 1994, in the little St. Thomas Chapel of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., Robert entered into full communion with the Catholic Church. By doing so, he became one of the Catholic Church in America’s leading scholars. 

Robert held a unique place in the academy. No other person served as president of these three societies: the North American Patristics Society (1985-86), the American Academy of Religion (1989), and the Academy of Catholic Theology (2012-13). 

Read it all.

Robert Louis Wilken, who died yesterday, was a giant of church history. His work on early Christian thought is incisive & so well-written that it’s a joy to read. I assigned his books in my classes & met him on numerous occasions. A true scholar & a faithful disciple of Christ. pic.twitter.com/fvaAb5GDAA

— Ryan N. Danker (@RyanNDanker) June 8, 2026

The much-discussed disappearance of book readers is a clear symptom of the nation’s attention crisis: Long-form reading, once an ordinary feature of educated life, is increasingly becoming a luxury. But even the shorter forms of writing are losing their audience, with newspapers and magazines struggling to hold readers. It’s a wonder anyone still has the patience for sustained argument.

The older way of consuming media can still be found on the Friday evenings when millions of Orthodox Jews enter a world where printed pages still matter. Stacks of books, tables littered with essays and commentaries, piles of Jewish magazines—these Orthodox homes form one of the few demographics where the printed word still thrives. Parents read and children grow up watching them do so. Conversations stretch for hours without the interruption of a vibrating phone. It is one of the last large communities in America where sustained attention isn’t an aspiration but a habit, born of the prohibition of mechanical and electric technology on the Sabbath, which runs from Friday evening to Saturday night.

Over the past year, with increased urgency from the rise of artificial-intelligence chatbots, voices from well beyond the Orthodox Jewish world have begun calling for some version of a weekly Sabbath. Jonathan Haidt has become a leading advocate for a regular digital detox. Charlie Kirk argued for something similar in his book “Stop in the Name of God.” Earlier this year, President Trump encouraged Americans to embrace a “national Sabbath” and invite “friends, families, and communities of all backgrounds” to step back from their devices for a day of gratitude and rest.

Their instinct is correct. The modern world desperately needs a weekly rhythm of rest. But if unplugging promises greater focus, stronger families and richer communities, why has it proved so difficult? The answer isn’t simply that we’re addicted to our phones. It’s that unplugging isn’t enough. A Sabbath isn’t merely the absence of technology. It is the presence of something richer.

Read it all.

We're loving this thoughtful Wall Street Journal op-ed from @DBashIdeas about one of Shabbat's greatest gifts: the chance to unplug, slow down and rediscover the joy of reading a great book. Sometimes the greatest luxury is simply having time.https://t.co/UqFjZEUmVG

— Jewish Treats (@JewishTweets) July 17, 2026

Gordon S. Wood, the great historian of the American founding, died at ninety-two on June 7, just weeks shy of the 250th anniversary of American independence. This coincidence does not quite possess the providential aura of Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s deaths on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. But Wood’s death offers an important opportunity to reflect on his brilliant contributions to American history, and to lament the passing of a great generation of historians, including Wood, who came of age during and after World War II. We’re not likely to see a generation of scholars like Wood’s again, nor would the elite academy welcome them if we did. 

In the mid-1990s, I was admitted to Brown University to work with Wood for a Ph.D. Alas, Brown had no stipend for an iffy candidate from a southern public school, so I went elsewhere. But Wood’s works, especially The Creation of the American Republic (1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), seeped into my bones anyway. As I have returned to my yellowed copies of his books in the days since his passing, I find myself regularly reminded of ideas about the Revolution and the Founders that I first learned from him. Now I just teach them as historical givens. 

Wood’s professional genealogy helps explain his trajectory as a scholar. His career was connected to three other major figures of American historical scholarship. The first was Bernard Bailyn, Wood’s doctoral adviser and longtime Harvard historian who died in 2020 at age ninety-seven. Then there was Edmund Morgan, Bailyn’s contemporary who taught at Brown for a decade before moving to Yale in the mid-1950s. Bailyn and Morgan both studied at Harvard with the legendary Perry Miller, one of the most influential American historians of the twentieth century. 

In this essay there’s no space to summarize the works of these four titans. But if you pick up a book by any of them, you’ll be treated to an intellectual feast. And Gordon Wood was part of a historiographical tradition that began with Miller.  

Read it all.

"Though America’s ideals were riddled with ironies and inconsistencies, the nation still emerged as a global beacon of ordered liberty. No one better explained the history and significance of that American nation than Gordon Wood." My essay at @PublicDiscourse…

— Thomas S. Kidd (@ThomasSKidd) July 17, 2026

[Gavin] Francis consistently challenges the labelling effect of standard diagnostic manuals, and the danger of “diagnostic creep”. “If we were able to hold the labels more lightly, aware of the human tendencies they oversimplify, would we be able to create a society more accepting of difference? Might it be less stigmatising, but also more hopeful, and more open to recovery?”

Religion appears from time to time. People who attend religious services evidently have a 20 per cent lower rate of depression than others. There is something priestly in the role of psychiatrist, “in that it concerns questions of doubt, faith and love”. More fundamentally, the author conveys a marvellous sense of wonder at the miracle and mystery of the human body and mind: “Wonder fosters humility, compassion and reverence for life — the cornerstones of all the major world religions, and fundamental qualities for the effective practice of medicine.”

Those involved in pastoral care can learn much from Francis’s account of his practice, and not least his insistence on the central place of kindness and compassion.

Read it all.

"Those involved in pastoral care can learn much from Francis’s account of his practice, and not least his insistence on the central place of kindness and compassion"

📚 Philip Welsh welcomes a GP’s reflections on mental-health issues#books https://t.co/LHAmMaRnUM

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) July 7, 2026

Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?

The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.

But to live,–to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered,–this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour,–this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.

When Tom stood face to face with his persecutor, and heard his threats, and thought in his very soul that his hour was come, his heart swelled bravely in him, and he thought he could bear torture and fire, bear anything, with the vision of Jesus and heaven but just a step beyond; but, when he was gone, and the present excitement passed off, came back the pain of his bruised and weary limbs,–came back the sense of his utterly degraded, hopeless, forlorn estate; and the day passed wearily enough.

Long before his wounds were healed, Legree insisted that he should be put to the regular field-work; and then came day after day of pain and weariness, aggravated by every kind of injustice and indignity that the ill-will of a mean and malicious mind could devise. Whoever, in our circumstances, has made trial of pain, even with all the alleviations which, for us, usually attend it, must know the irritation that comes with it. Tom no longer wondered at the habitual surliness of his associates; nay, he found the placid, sunny temper, which had been the habitude of his life, broken in on, and sorely strained, by the inroads of the same thing. He had flattered himself on leisure to read his Bible; but there was no such thing as leisure there. In the height of the season, Legree did not hesitate to press all his hands through, Sundays and week-days alike. Why shouldn’t he?””he made more cotton by it, and gained his wager; and if it wore out a few more hands, he could buy better ones. At first, Tom used to read a verse or two of his Bible, by the flicker of the fire, after he had returned from his daily toil; but, after the cruel treatment he received, he used to come home so exhausted, that his head swam and his eyes failed when he tried to read; and he was fain to stretch himself down, with the others, in utter exhaustion.

Is it strange that the religious peace and trust, which had upborne him hitherto, should give way to tossings of soul and despondent darkness? The gloomiest problem of this mysterious life was constantly before his eyes, souls crushed and ruined, evil triumphant, and God silent. It was weeks and months that Tom wrestled, in his own soul, in darkness and sorrow. He thought of Miss Ophelia’s letter to his Kentucky friends, and would pray earnestly that God would send him deliverance. And then he would watch, day after day, in the vague hope of seeing somebody sent to redeem him; and, when nobody came, he would crush back to his soul bitter thoughts,that it was vain to serve God, that God had forgotten him. He sometimes saw Cassy; and sometimes, when summoned to the house, caught a glimpse of the dejected form of Emmeline, but held very little communion with either; in fact, there was no time for him to commune with anybody.

–Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was published in book form for the first time #OTD in 1852. It had first been published 10 months earlier in serial form in ‘The National Era’, and abolitionist periodical. #WomensHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/1tFtJZGllR

— Civil War On This Day (@CivilWarOTD) March 20, 2022

Patrick Brown, Contributing Editor 

I am sure I am far from the only member of the Public Discourse family to be preparing for the release of Christopher Nolan’s adaption of The Odyssey later this summer. In part because the tale was initially orally transmitted (and in part because it’s easier to sneak in chunks of listening time while watching kids at the park), I made a point of picking an audiobook recording—Sir Ian McKellen reads the Fagles translation with characteristic aplomb. Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It is on my list for professional reasons, and Leander Schaerlaeckens’ history of the U.S. soccer program The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top is helping me get in the World Cup spirit. Then I have to decide whether I want to make room for Caro Clare Burke’s viral tradwife novel Yesteryear … 

Alexandra Davis, Managing Editor 

My reading group is taking on Les Miserables this summer, so I am currently carrying around what I fondly call my “brick” with me in my diaper bag. It’s quite the conversation piece when I whip it out at the pool, all 1,100+ pages of it. It’s been a blast sending our favorite witty Hugo lines to our group text thread and declaring which parts of the narrative have left us decidedly “not okay.” In all seriousness, Les Mis will always remain among my favorite stories about human complexity, concupiscence, and redemption. May we all aspire to be Jean Valjean when, at times, we are regrettably more like Javert. (Our reading group will also enjoy a screening of the 2012 movie this summer, which is a masterpiece, Russell Crowe’s singing notwithstanding.) 

For a much lighter, cannot-put-it-down read, I’m nearly finished with the Catholic author (and occasional PD writer) Claire Swinarski’s novel The Supper Club Saints. It’s been a while since I’ve read a contemporary novel that so searingly captures the most honest and often unflattering angles of a mother’s interior dialogue. Not to mention, it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. Claire does enjoy some salty language, though, so caveat emptor, especially if you’re listening to an audio version….

Read it all.

https://t.co/mqdGZTdRDW Here’s what our editors are reading this summer.

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) June 25, 2026

The Golden Result is a corollary to the Golden Rule, which calls us to do to others as we would have them do to us. The Golden Result says that people will usually treat us as we treat them. If we blame others for a problem, they will usually blame in return. But if we say, “I was wrong,” it is amazing how often the response will be, “It was my fault too.” I have seen this result in hundreds of cases over the past twenty-one years. Whether the dispute involves a personal quarrel, divorce, lawsuit, or church division, people generally treat one another as they are being treated.

When one person attacks and accuses, so does the other. And when God moves one person to start getting the log out of his or her own eye, it is rare that the other side fails to do the same. The Golden Result occurs most often with people who understand and cherish the gospel. When we admit that our own sins are so serious that Jesus had to die for us, and remember that he has forgiven us for all our wrongs, we can let go of our illusion of self-righteousness and freely admit our failures. When we do this, we experience the wonderful gift of God’s forgiveness. And in many cases, he will be pleased to use our confessions to help others see the logs in their eyes.

Ken Sande, The Peacemaker (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991)

Two centuries ago, most American magazine and newspaper editors professed Christian faith and wanted their publications to show it—but many lost their audiences when new publications offered street-level reporting that won more readers than literary essays.

That’s important history to understand, but you won’t read about it in Alex Wright’s new book Empire of Ink, a supposed history of American journalism through 1900. Wright amusingly describes antics of The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper, as the subtitle states, but he skips the Christians and in doing so misses the forest for trees, billions of which fell in the centuries when words on paper ruled. 

But just as Wright overlooks something important, so did I—until my research for a history of abortion led me to what Wright rightly calls “racy papers … bearing names like The Flash, The Whip, The Rake, and The Libertine,” bearing “headings like Lives of the Nymphs.” They published detailed and prurient profiles of prostitutes, listing their addresses as a service to readers eager (as one critic wrote) to “fill the paths to perdition.” 

Wright also describes how newspapers first celebrated Charles Dickens when the author came to the US in 1842, then called him “a literary bagman.” Dickens reciprocated, attacking “moral poison” and arguing that “the influence of the good, is powerless to counteract the moral poison of the bad.” My sense is that Wright overemphasizes the bad in early American journalism, but I may have underestimated it. 

Read it all.

(CT) Marvin Olasky–'[Alex] Wright amusingly describes antics of The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper, as the subtitle states, but he skips the Christians and in doing so misses the forest for trees, billions of which fell in the centuries when…

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) June 19, 2026

Is it ethical to alter the genetic makeup of children? Should we create children with three parents? What about creating sperm from female stem cells to the end of creating a child with two biological mothers? Is it ethical to incubate a growing baby in an artificial womb? Could a womb like that end the perceived need for abortion?  

These questions might seem like science fiction, and indeed they were when Aldous Huxley, an agnostic, published his dystopian novel Brave New World nearly one hundred years ago. Huxley wove a fictitious world in which progeny were designed and grown in laboratories, children were raised by the state rather than in families, promiscuity was encouraged and monogamy considered grotesque, and the government endorsed self-medication with a “harmless” drug that kept its users in a placated state. 

Yet these are the questions up for debate in today’s public square, as evidenced by a recent debate hosted by The Free Press: “Is Designing Babies Unethical—Or a Moral Imperative?”  

All things considered, one has to wonder if Huxley wasn’t more a prophet than a novelist.  

Read it all.

https://t.co/vb0gflsCQ0 The elimination of suffering will not produce joy. If we seek to be truly free, we must acknowledge our responsibilities to one another. We will flourish to the extent that we all can flourish.

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) June 14, 2026

The Christian faith is by nature conservative—in a theological sense. The Scriptures are replete with verses pointing to the unchanging and enduring nature of God and the Bible. Revelation 1:8 says, “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty’” (ESV throughout). Malachi 3:6 says, “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” Isaiah 40:8 says, “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” These verses do not mean that the biblical text cannot be distorted or manipulated by self-serving people, but it does mean that the Bible is not a party platform that gets updated every four years.

Thankfully, there are countless others who are faithfully preaching and teaching God’s word. These congregations are often small and do not receive any media attention. Many are led by pastors more concerned with preparing their members for eternity in heaven than getting souls to the polls on Election Day. Some of these churches have vibrant ministries for men, women, and families. They are committed to remaining faithful to biblical ethics regarding sex, sexuality, marriage, family, and the sanctity of life without any concern for whether elected Democrats—or Republicans—agree.

Liberation-minded pastors who reject the biblical definitions and descriptions of sex and marriage are incapable of doing the work needed to rebuild the Black family. They fashion themselves as brave prophets, but they make race and politics twin idols that draw their hearts—and pulpits—away from God.

Christians are often told to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing. That is wise counsel, but what’s even more dangerous is a wolf in shepherd’s clothing. The former can devour a few sheep before the others scatter, but the latter can lead an entire flock over a cliff.

One ray of hope is the biblical theme of God’s mercy on those who turn from their wicked ways and trust him. The pattern in both the Old and New Testaments is quite familiar. God’s people rebel. He rebukes them. They reflect on their sin and repent. He restores them. This is my prayer because the Black family needs the church to function in its God-given role now more than ever.

Read it all.

“Instead, liberation theology has transformed the Black church from a religious institution dedicated to the pursuit of righteousness to the religious wing of the Democratic Party.”https://t.co/Bh1V8SBXWw

— TheQueenofLA 🇺🇸 (@Queenofla2) June 17, 2026

For his part, while Hamilton favored a more active role for government in promoting commerce, his ultimate aim was almost the same as Jefferson’s: securing the rights proclaimed in the Declaration. But by enhancing commerce, Hamilton aspired to enable ordinary Americans to emulate his path of rising to prosperity through their own initiative and industry.  

Both men would surely have been horrified by the enormous and intrusive bureaucracy that the progressive movement bequeathed to us. As Rosen puts it, “in the name of Jefferson’s commitment to equal economic opportunity, Roosevelt had buried Jefferson’s commitment to limited government” (though Rosen surely errs in calling his program “Hamiltonian”). Rosen does cite Ronald Reagan’s “Jeffersonian criticisms” of the Great Society “antipoverty” program of FDR’s successor Lyndon Johnson for undermining welfare recipients’ incentive to work, while also noting how the articles of impeachment that Congress drew against Richard Nixon, drawing on Federalist no. 69, finally “refuted” Jefferson’s charge that Hamilton had been a monarchist

Finally, in the area of constitutional interpretation, Rosen quotes Justice Antonin Scalia’s embrace of “the interpretative approach of the Hamiltonian justice Joseph Story” according to which the Constitution’s words should be construed neither broadly nor strictly, but rather taking them “in their natural and obvious sense” (though that phrase obviously leaves considerable room for dispute in particular cases). But Rosen departs from Scalia by insisting that “the central dispute on the Supreme Court” since the Founding “has not been between originalism and non-originalism, but between liberal and strict construction of federal power”: how would that distinction apply to decisions applauded by “living constitutionalists” like Roe v. Wade, which have no grounding in the Constitution’s text at all?  

Whatever one’s judgment of these controversies, it is impossible to differ with Rosen’s concluding judgment that “the greatest threat to the American Idea” throughout our history has come not from those who inconsistently apply Hamilton’s or Jefferson’s principles, but “from those who have rejected the principles entirely,” from Calhoun and others who renounced the claim of natural human equality as “a self-evident lie” to “progressive and conservative ideologues today” who would replace the Constitution entirely with a “resort to violence.” Taken as a whole, Rosen’s book offers a learned and sober account of the relevance of Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s principles to America’s past, present, and possible future. 

Read it all.

National Constitution Center President & CEO Jeffrey Rosen discusses his book, "The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America."

Watch here: https://t.co/pYS9vkWqTb pic.twitter.com/jj7ARdujMR

— Washington Journal (@cspanwj) December 25, 2025

In little more than ten years St. Paul established the Church in four provinces of the Empire, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. Before AD 47 there were no churches in these provinces; in AD 57 St. Paul could speak as if his work there was done, and could plan extensive tours into the far west without anxiety lest the churches which he had founded might perish in his absence for want of his guidance and support.

The work of the Apostle during these ten years can therefore be treated as a unity. Whatever assistance he may have received from the preaching of others, it is unquestioned that the establishment of the churches in these provinces was really his work. In the pages of the New Testament he, and he alone, stands forth as their founder. And the work which he did was really a completed work. So far as the foundation of the churches is concerned, it is perfectly clear that the writer of the Acts intends to represent St. Paul’s work as complete. The churches were really established. Whatever disasters fell upon them in later years, whatever failure there was, whatever ruin, that failure was not due to any insufficiency or lack of care and completeness in the Apostle’s teaching or organization. When he left them he left them because his work was fully accomplished.

This is truly an astonishing fact. That churches should be founded so rapidly, so securely, seems to us today, accustomed to the difficulties, the uncertainties, the failures, the disastrous relapses of our own missionary work, almost incredible. Many missionaries in later days have received a larger number of converts than St. Paul; many have preached over a wider area than he; but none have so established churches. We have long forgotten that such things could be. We have long accustomed ourselves to accept it as an axiom of missionary work that converts in a new country must be submitted to a very long probation and training, extending over generations before they can be expected to be able to stand alone. Today if a man ventures to suggest that there may be something in the methods by which St. Paul attained such wonderful results worthy of our careful attention, and perhaps of our imitation, he is in danger of being accused of revolutionary tendencies.

–Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours; A Study of The Church In The Four Provinces, Chapter One

Want to come prepared to the 2019 Intersection Conference? @BpToddHunter suggests "The Church and Its Vocation: Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology" by Michael Goheen and "Roland Allen: A Theology of Mission" by Steven Rutt #intersection19 https://t.co/sTGpAN9eCS pic.twitter.com/OY83a8mlMf

— The Telos Collective (@TelosCollective) February 23, 2019

Heavenly Father, who didst call thy servant Bede, while still a child, to devote his life to thy service in the disciplines of religion and scholarship: Grant that as he labored in the Spirit to bring the riches of thy truth to his generation, so we, in our various vocations, may strive to make thee known in all the world; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

May 25: Feast of Bede (673-735), priest of Gyruum (Jarrow), biblical scholar. Wrote Ecclesiastical History of the English People. When news of his death reached missionaries, Boniface wrote ‘the candle of the Church, lit by the Holy Spirit, was extinguished’. Originally May 26. pic.twitter.com/JCoQKakVEn

— North Ages (@NorthAges) May 25, 2026

Unlike the earlier book, God’s Homecoming answers with a sweeping, if necessarily whistle-stop, biblical theology. “The Bible speaks with one voice of God coming to live with humans. Of God coming to be at home with us humans” (emphasis original). These pages are saturated with quotations of scripture, and particularly the Old Testament, something that those familiar with the styles of both Tom and his alter ego N. T. Wright will recognise and appreciate. Readers are borne along on the currents of prophecy and promise, gathering steam as the story of Israel’s God coming to dwell with his people rolls toward a climactic fulfilment.

The book’s primary thesis is that this fulfilment has now taken place in the “coming home” of God in Jesus, the human face of God, and the Holy Spirit, the pledge of the world’s suffusion with divine presence. The Kingdom does not merely wait for a future return of Christ, but has already been powerfully inaugurated.

Thus, the arrival of God on earth and not the soul’s arrival in heaven is central; living with God in a renewed creation…

Read it all.

“The point of Christianity is not that we should go to heaven. The point of Christianity is that heaven should come to us.”
-N.T. Wright, God’s Homecominghttps://t.co/9nO2h4VBHq

— Tom Wright (@profntwright) February 15, 2026

Is the American Revolution over? As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States this year, public commentators will answer this question differently. For some, the Revolution was an event that happened in the distant past. They will celebrate the 250th with three-cornered hats, battle reenactments, and visits to historic sites. Others may try to “reclaim” the Revolution, as if the beliefs of the founding fathers froze in the 18th century and just need thawing and application in the 21st, as if little has changed since 1776.

Still others see the Revolution as ongoing. This latter view, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal argues in The Long Revolution, is the way most Americans living before the Civil War understood the Revolution.

Read it all.

Historian @JohnFea1 reviews three history books that explore the stories we tell about America and the immigrants who call it home.https://t.co/63SOf6JWZG

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) May 18, 2026

It has been suggestively proposed that the book’s “presiding genius is Pascal.” Indeed, Pascal is cited or referenced fourteen times in the extant letters. One may note, in passing, that Clermont-Ferrand, the editor’s residence, is the birthplace of Pascal.

Perhaps, however, the archbishop’s vision owes even more to the second century Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons. The dual manuscript tradition, the English and Spanish versions of the letters, present, according to Hermès, “no variant readings,” save in one important particular. The heading of the English recension echoes Athanasius and reads forthrightly: “Letters on the Incarnation.” The Spanish compilation, instead, adapts Irenaeus, with an added flourish: “Letters on the Detection and Overthrow of Reality Falsely So Called.” Assuredly, the archbishop is bent on calling out the simulacra of reality that grow ever more pervasive and controlling. 

Still, both renditions capture something essential about the spirit and scope of these letters. For they offer a penetrating and passionate refutation of a prevalent Gnosticism that abhors this body, this community, this Church, where true life is won, paradoxically, only at the price of this death. Thus, the letters constitute an uncompromising polemic against what the archbishop calls the “disincarnation” practiced by the “indefatigable Gnostics.”  

Read it all.

Against Excarnation https://t.co/BbePQPWchc

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) May 13, 2026

Perhaps [Günther] Anders’s most important concept for our current moment, however, is that of the “Promethean gradient.” He uses this term to refer to the disproportionality between human faculties: we can achieve things in the sphere of technology that far outstrip the ability of our moral imagination to comprehend them.   

An example would be nuclear weapons: the level of destruction that a nuclear bomb can achieve is far beyond anything we can imagine. That possibly apocryphal saying ascribed to Josef Stalin, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” captures this idea. I might be horrified at the face of a murder victim on the news; a picture of the mushroom cloud at Nagasaki does not have the same impact. Today, we can apply it to the tech bros: their technological innovation proceeds at a pace that outstrips any moral vision that might curb or direct it.

In light of this, the early departure of the tech bros from the summit I mentioned is understandable: there can be no moral accountability—indeed, they cannot even imagine what that would look like—because they are engaged in technological innovations beyond anything the current moral imagination can grasp. As Hans Jonas observed in the early 1970s, the advent of technology that was not simply external to human beings (steam, the internal combustion engine) but that touched on the nature of existence at both a profound and highly abstract level—for Jonas, chemistry; for us now, genetic engineering—grants the technological revolution theoretically limitless power to destabilize what it means to be human. And we cannot imagine what that might look like. Add to that the implications of social acceleration—that technology develops at a faster pace than can be assimilated into the moral imagination—and the problem Anders calls the Promethean gradient is set to become worse. Our technology liberates us from any sense of the authority of natural limits (let alone God-given ends), yet in itself it provides no new moral norms for how such liberation is to be exercised. 

But the Promethean gradient is not simply significant in the way it unshackles technological development from the moral imagination. It also has a paradoxical effect on human experience: our genius for technological development, that capacity that separates us from all other creatures and arguably forms part of our greatness, is precisely what renders us nothing in our eyes and therefore feeds despair. This Anders calls “Promethean shame,” which he sees as the result of the conflict between knowing ourselves as persons and yet finding ourselves reduced to mere “things” because of the technology we ourselves have developed. In Anders’s day, the primary culprits were nuclear weapons. Their development required the collaboration of free, intelligent, intentional human persons. But the result was that we human beings became the only creatures on earth who could, quite literally, annihilate ourselves. Man’s exceptional technological greatness had ironically given him the ability to make himself puny, contingent, and unnecessary in his own eyes.   

Today, this still applies, but it has expanded beyond narrow military technology to include such things as AI and transhumanism.

Read it all.

These hyper modernist dystopias that people want to create in Yemen and Gaza are so anti-human and unnatural as they completely deny the most important aspect of stability: socio-political and communal resilience https://t.co/G5XYfQ1fdJ

— Dr Andreas Krieg (@andreas_krieg) December 31, 2025