Founding Deists and Other Unicorns by James Bruce

Founding Deists and Other Unicorns by James Bruce 

In today’s fights over religious establishment, liberty, and accommodation, our assumption that America did not have a Christian founding leads us to embrace the wrong conclusions—or perhaps just assumptions—about what the founders would have wanted religion in our public life to look like. 

Great reminder of what our Founders actually believed and why it matters.

1776, not 1619 by Arthur Milikh

1776, not 1619 by Arthur Milikh

Black Americans have been treated in a grossly unjust fashion throughout our history. But the Declaration and the Constitution themselves, according to the Founders’ intentions, contain the principles through which justice would come, as Fredrick Douglass and, later, Martin Luther King, Jr. believed. These countervailing facts and statements, should produce a more balanced view of America’s Founding. 

Well-written piece responding to the NYT 1619 project.

How Steam and Chips Remade the World by John Steele Gordon

How Steam and Chips Remade the World by John Steele Gordon

As the railroad was for the steam engine, the internet is the microprocessor’s most significant subsidiary invention. It revolutionized retailing, news distribution, entertainment, communication and much more.

Like cheap energy, cheap information has created enormous new fortunes, ineluctably increasing wealth inequality. But also like cheap energy, the source of those fortunes has given nearly everybody a far higher standard of living. 

To understand how profound the microprocessor revolution has been, consider this. The great science writer Arthur Clarke once noted that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A man from half a century ago would surely regard the now-ubiquitous smartphone as magic.

A celebration of technological innovation. 

The Freedom of a Christian Nation by Brad Littlejohn

The Freedom of a Christian Nation by Brad Littlejohn

For all their insight, Reformers like Vermigli and Hooker will not provide us sufficient resources to counter such claims. Instead, we must look to Luther himself, with his crucial but neglected theology of the “three estates”—family, church, and state—and even more to the great early Protestant political theorist Johannes Althusius, who took up his pen at the same time as Hooker to propose a bottom-up theory of the state as a “community of communities” that would reject papal pretensions, head off the ambitions of absolute rulers and despotic national states, and lay a groundwork for durable individual liberty. No effort toward a “Protestant Christendom” will get airborne without the guiding lights of Hookerian nationalism and Althusian federalism.

Fascinating and complex article on the fallout from the Reformation in terms of liberty.

She BenOpped. It Didn’t Work by Rod Dreher

She BenOpped. It Didn’t Work by Rod Dreher

There are no guarantees. If you read The Benedict Option looking for the perfect solution, the 10-point plan that will keep your family Christian, you’re not going to find it. That’s because it doesn’t exist. 

Sad story from a homeschooling mom and her grown children's loss of faith.

Rembrandt Painted The Best Portrait Of Freedom Ever, And Here It Is by Andrei Illarionov

Rembrandt Painted The Best Portrait Of Freedom Ever, And Here It Is by Andrei Illarionov

Notably, The Night Watch is a group portrait. Although freedom is often perceived as an individual (personal) quality, its maintenance and protection require group efforts. Regardless of how free, talented, creative, independent, or strong an individual is, alone he or she is unable to protect his or her property and loved ones in a clash with a band of gangsters, regardless of whether those gangsters are a private enterprise or agents of a state. Collective efforts are necessary to protect personal freedom.

This would make a good Art Journal project.

“What, to a Slave, is the Fourth of July?” by Eric Wearne

“What, to a Slave, is the Fourth of July?” by Eric Wearne

The climax of the speech is incredibly uncomfortable, and one can certainly imagine a room of northern elites, self-satisfied in their invitation of this former slave, sweating profusely from the summer heat and from their discomfort, but not quite able to argue against Douglass’ points.

One of the most important speeches ever uttered.

The Flagrant Distortions and Subtle Lies of the ‘1619 Project’ by Rich Lowry

The Flagrant Distortions and Subtle Lies of the ‘1619 Project’ by Rich Lowry

This gets at the crux of the matter. The American past has had its share of both hypocrisy and nobility. Truthfulness demands that we acknowledge both. Americans were hypocrites in extolling liberty and grounding our national identity to a significant extent in it, while at the same tolerating or even embracing slavery. But, over time, the principles and rhetoric of freedom proved powerful tools against slavery.

The stakes in getting this right are large. If they succeed in making America only about the hypocrisy, the architects of the 1619 Project will deny the country’s nobility to the rising generation. They will have made America, in Huntington’s terms, a lie pure and simple, and enshrined their own hostile, mythologized account of our history.

Great historical refutation of the NYT 1619 project.

Elites Against Western Civilization by Joel Kotkin

Elites Against Western Civilization by Joel Kotkin

If one does not even know about the complex legacy underpinning democracy, including the drive for individual freedom and open discussion, one is not likely to understand when it is in peril. If we are to save our uniquely open civilization, we must counter the clerisy’s efforts to discredit our past and demolish our future.

Kotkin at his best describing our cultural catastrophe.