It was surreal. President Biden began his State of the Union speech by invoking the Nazi threat. More than eighty years ago, Biden reminded us, Franklin Roosevelt rallied the nation, as “Hitler was on the march,” and “freedom and democracy were under assault.” Today, the president warned, the fascist enemy rampages anew, not only on the world stage, but in America herself. This time the tyrant is Putin, while the dagger at the “throat of American democracy” is insurrection. “What makes our moment rare,” Biden intoned, “is that freedom and democracy are under attack—both at home and overseas at the very same time.”
On their face, Biden’s claims are wildly irresponsible. He implies that Donald Trump and his supporters are not mere political opponents, but Hitlerian foes and traitors. With rhetoric like that coming from a sitting president as he speaks to the nation, it’s no wonder that our politics is bitterly divisive and our society polarized. What is the greater threat to democracy: a ragtag mob in the Capitol, or a major political party that defines political opposition as treason?
The allure of this way of talking seems irresistible to liberal elites, even as it damages the body politic. Hitler, fascism, Nazism: There’s rarely an issue of The Atlantic or a week of editorials in the New York Times that doesn’t mine the 1930s for analogies. It’s as if we were living a collective version of the film Groundhog Day. It’s always 1939.
At this late date, the resort to Hitler suggests a decadent political culture, a case of arrested development. The Civil War had concluded less than seventy years before Herbert Hoover ran for reelection in 1932. Yet neither he nor his opponent, Franklin Roosevelt, regularly used that conflict to frame the choice that faced the nation. Jefferson Davis was not deemed the specter haunting the American people. Hitler’s body was consumed by flames in his bunker in Berlin nearly eighty years ago, and yet he still lives in our political imaginations as an ever-present threat. Biden was a toddler in 1945, unconscious of world events when Hitler died. Yet he and his speechwriters make ready appeal, confident that listeners will find Hitler and his misdoings salient to our times.
Renaud Camus is a mauvais garçon in the French literary scene. He’s not afraid to speak inconvenient truths and expose the self-deceptions of the establishment. He has meditated on the phrase “the second career of Adolf Hitler.” The dictator’s first career, which played out in Germany during the years of the Third Reich, ended in death and defeat. In the 1960s, Hitler attained a second life, this time as the incarnation of evil. His name was deployed “as an absolute weapon of language, as its supreme fulmination, the atomic bomb of maledictions.” Dread of Hitler’s return exercised an almost totalitarian power, “a dread,” Camus notes, “that proved a tremendously effective mode of presence for this consummate dictator.” The West threw itself into anti-racism and anti-colonialism as sacred projects. Longstanding authorities and traditional forms of life were held in suspicion, interrogated for signs of latent fascism. Patriarchy, homophobia, and the rest became further forms of Hitlerian abomination. The work is ongoing. “Europe is like a patient who has suffered from a terrible cancer—Hitlerism—and who is endlessly operated on and reoperated on by terrifically thorough, if perhaps not always very professional, surgeons.” The mildest symptoms trigger the most extreme procedures.
Pierre Manent has dubbed this establishment extremism the “fanaticism of the center.” We see it in action today. The populace manifests discontent. Polling shows hostility toward mass migration. Populist politicians enjoy support. Against this threat, the establishment turns to Hitler, the peril with which to bludgeon those who object to elite governance. Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, and the second coming of Hitler plays a role here as well. He ensures that anyone who urges negotiation and compromise will be denounced as a naive appeaser or treacherous quisling. One must not sup with the devil!
I lack Camus’s literary élan. In Return of the Strong Gods, I offer a more pedestrian explanation for Hitler’s continuing relevance to contemporary political and cultural affairs. The bloody years from 1914 to 1945 were a civilizational catastrophe for the West. As the victors, American liberals blamed the war on the “closed society,” the social form that prized solidarity and obeyed authority. The designated remedy was an “open society” that encouraged “open minds.” The title of Karl Popper’s influential book framed the agenda: The Open Society and Its Enemies. The tacit violence of Popper’s title (elaborated at length in his relentless attack on Plato, which amounts to a denunciation of nearly the entire philosophical tradition of the West) indicates the imperial, indeed paradoxically totalitarian, ambitions of the open-society consensus. Its Manichean logic recapitulates National Socialism, simply inverting the latter’s ambitions. The future of the West requires defeating internal enemies, excising cancerous growths—otherwise, Hitler might return.
The men and women who promoted the open-society consensus after World War II were generally moderate. But from the outset, the consensus had a utopian character: to create a world in which another Hitler would be impossible. And like all utopian projects, this one lost touch with reality over time. We cannot in fact organize our lives around the ideal of the “open mind.” And we certainly cannot sustain an actually existing society if we treat “openness” as the highest good. Political correctness and cancel culture grew out of open-society liberalism. They are punitive strategies and disciplinary regimes that protect the open-society consensus from reality-based criticism. Concerned about social cohesion in our era of mass migration? You’re a racist. Sympathetic to populist politicians? You’re a fascist.
Biden’s uses of these maledictions are ham-handed. He never does with a scalpel what he can do with a machete. The opening of his State of the Union is more than tiresome, though—it’s troubling. The year is 2024, not 1939. We face very significant challenges—rampant mental illness, declines in marriage and fertility, mass migration, runaway environmental ideologies, deindustrialization, global instability, and more—and we can’t address them until we let go of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, some of those problems fester because of our fixation on him. A culture that puts the memory of Nazism at the center of its self-understanding is almost certain to slide toward nihilism. It’s time to bring Hitler’s second career to an end.
Winds of Change are Blowing
The Holy Spirit is at work in Finland. As in other Nordic countries, church membership in Finland has plummeted in recent decades. But fifteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old men are bucking the trend. Only 5 percent of men in that age group attended church monthly in 2011. In 2019 participation rose to 12 percent. Self-reported regular prayer shows a similar increase among young men, as does belief in God. In 2011, 16 percent of young men said they prayed at least once a week; in 2019 the rate jumped to 26 percent. Belief in God leaped from 19 percent to 43 percent over the same eight-year period. Survey data show no increase of religiosity among women, whose monthly church attendance was lower than that of men in 2011 (3 percent) and remained low in 2019 (4 percent).
One should be cautious about interpreting trends, especially in faraway countries. But the uptick in Gen Z religiosity in Finland, especially among males, mirrors phenomena I observe in America.
There’s a great deal of discontent among the young. It’s apparent in woke radicalism, which traffics in condemnations of nearly all of Western culture (settler colonialism, systemic racism, patriarchy, and other sins). The widespread use of antidepressants and other medications suggests a glum dissatisfaction with the way things are going. A veto of the status quo is not limited to those who are depressed and despairing, or to those who lean left. As many commentators have pointed out, a growing number of Gen Z folks, especially males, lurk in the shadowy world of dissident right extremism. In those circles, the conversation is far more hostile to conventional attitudes and mainstream politics than is the subsidized radicalism you find in the local university’s black studies and womanist programs.
I sympathize with the alienation. America is a rich country, far richer than when I was coming of age. But life is lousy for young people. If your parents are rich and ambitious on your behalf, you’ll be fed into the spiritual meat grinder of meritocratic competition at school, travel teams in sports, and endless activities aiming at enrichment. If your parents are middle-class, they’re likely to be divorced. You probably attend public schools, which are run in accord with therapeutic principles that ask very little of you. Meanwhile, the smartphone colonizes your mind. If you have the misfortune to be poor, your parents won’t have married, mom will be on her third live-in boyfriend, and some of your friends will have drowned in the ocean of cheap fentanyl. As for love and romance, the dating game is almost entirely dysfunctional across all social classes. The country’s political culture isn’t healthy, either; it has been poisoned by sanctimonious Baby Boomers. Institutions are not trustworthy; employment is nakedly transactional.
In view of the pervasive sense of betrayal, I’m surprised that so few young people are radicalized. Most cynically conform, vaguely satisfied with the material consolations our system offers. Dining out! Travel! But if a recent university graduate or thoughtful young pipe fitter has a spirited nature and refuses to conform, the traditional avenues of progressive rebellion do not appeal. They have become just as professionalized as the professions. Barack Obama’s career indicates that the job of “community organizer” is now part of the grueling process of résumé-building. Today, the landscape on the left is confined and constricted; open spaces and unimpeded vistas are on the “right.”
I put scare quotes around “right” because I do not want to be misunderstood. In the United States, political conservatism has roots in classical liberalism. As a consequence, it emphasizes freedom, especially free markets. But this is an American anomaly. In the larger context of the modern West, the party of authority occupies the right, while the party of liberation occupies the left.
In previous columns, I’ve mentioned Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sketch of modern politics. He characterizes it as a contest (fruitful in his reckoning) between the Party of Permanency and the Party of Change. In this dialectic, the Party of Permanency is not animated by a witless “fear of change,” as so many progressives like to think, nor is it mired in a pathological “rigidity,” as the pope often says. Rather, those on the right recognize that obedience can be an engine of transcendence. When we submit to legitimate authority, we’re drawn outside ourselves to serve something higher than our self-interest. This ecstatic dynamic, this “going out” of ourselves, is a necessary condition for nobility of soul.
As I detail in Return of the Strong Gods, the open-society consensus and small-minded, debunking gestures of “critical thinking” have stripped our society of legitimate authority. God is treated as an oppressive illusion. The nation is a racist conspiracy with origins in settler colonialism. Marriage has been redefined beyond recognition. Not even nature herself is permitted to issue her gentle commands concerning what it means to be born as male or female. As a consequence, we are abandoned to our unruly desires, now liberated, while at the same time enslaved to a technocratic regime of utility-maximization. Neither path leads to self-possession, which can be attained only in and through obedience to something higher than oneself.
Woke activism has great appeal because it serves as a seemingly noble cause. Fight racism! Defend transgender rights! Save the planet! From the River to the Sea! But as I note above, this option suffers from its success. A smart young person recognizes that fully funded activism (the kind that helps you gain admission to Ivy League schools) hardly counts as an adventure of the soul. Moreover, the woke agenda and other progressive programs are political. Transforming society is not the same as the interior drama of love and devotion. As a consequence, when the desire to live for something other than oneself awakens in a young person, given the cultural and political realities of our time, he’s likely to turn rightward and seek what I call the “strong gods.”
Most people follow the herd. Progressivism is sure to maintain its hegemony, at least in the short and medium term. But the old adventures of liberation have become clichés. Allen Ginsberg got establishment accolades before he died, and that was a generation ago. Today the thrill of danger, visions of heroic self-sacrifice, and the romance of transcendence are to be found in the burning embers of authority. Jordan Peterson’s remarkable ascent a few years ago was a harbinger; the popularity of the Latin Mass among young Catholics is a sign. Young men in Finland and elsewhere are not going to church in order to “turn back the clock.” Students are not reading Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt and entertaining integralist and postliberal theories because they “fear change.” They want to stoke their metaphysical imaginations and find their way out of the spiritual poverty of the late-modern West. However much I fear the false prophets and excesses of passion that are sure to come, I share their hopes and ambitions.
Second Thoughts
It makes for arresting reading. Nobel prize–winning economist Angus Deaton has been a practicing economist for fifty years. In a recent column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, he explains that he has changed his mind about a number of important matters, among them the following:
Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game. Without an analysis of power, it is hard to understand inequality or much else in modern capitalism.
Put simply, there’s more to economics than economics. Without considerations of political economy, an economist cannot give an accurate account of actually existing economies.
“We often equate well-being to money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people. In current economic thinking, individuals matter much more than relationships between people in families or in communities.” In other words, never trust an economist who hasn’t read Aristotle and Augustine. He operates with an impoverished account of the motives that drive us: our interests, desires, and aspirations.
An impoverished, “economistic” anthropology gives rise to theoretically elegant explanations that turn out to be true only in narrowly circumscribed situations, while the big picture remains obscure, or even distorted by efforts to shoehorn complex realities into narrow economic frameworks. As Deaton confesses, “Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms that are plausible, interesting, and worth thinking about, even if they do not meet the inferential standards of contemporary applied economics.” As John Henry Newman noted, only small truths can be proven; consequential matters must be weighed and judged, an art improved by the acquisition of general knowledge. The best economists are able to think in more than economic terms. Witness Albert Hirschman and Karl Polanyi.
Deaton puts forward some specific reconsiderations. They concern the neoliberal consensus that has reigned supreme for the last fifty years. Deaton’s second thoughts are explosive.
In the past, Deaton regarded labor unions as a drag on economic efficiency and thought their demise a net gain for society. Now he thinks otherwise.
Unions once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people. . . . Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share [of firm profits], to the widening gap between executives and workers, to community destruction, and to rising populism.
Might it be the case that in our particular moment in history we would be well served by legislation that encourages private sector unions? For everything there is a season.
Deaton has second thoughts, too, about one of the pillars of globalist thinking. “I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and”—here comes the bombshell—“am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction of global poverty over the past 30 years.” He speculates that India and China would have experienced rapid growth without the American-designed global system of free trade. Then comes a mea culpa: “I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers.” All of us, including green-eyeshade economists, have obligations to our fellow citizens. A generic love of humanity sounds high-minded, but it is not.
What about immigration? Deaton has changed his mind on this topic as well. “I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so.” He observes that economic inequality was high during the Gilded Age, when few limits were placed on immigration; it fell as restrictions were imposed, then rose again when they were lifted, beginning with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Like globalization, open borders come at a significant cost to the most vulnerable Americans.
Late in his life, Augustine dictated his second thoughts, his Retractationes, which are detailed and extensive. Deaton’s reconsiderations are short. But they are consequential. One hopes that many others who constructed and justified the economic consensus of the last fifty years will have the courage to do the same.
Religion in Public Life
Polarization has become a watchword. But a recent Pew survey of the role of religion in public life (“8 in 10 Americans Say Religion is Losing Influence in Public Life”) indicates that Americans agree about at least one thing: Religion is, indeed, losing influence. It does not matter whether you are Christian or atheist, a Protestant or None, Democrat or Republican: A super-majority of those surveyed (80 percent) say that the social influence of religion is waning. Public discourse in America is being secularized.
The Pew researchers are delicate. They use the term “religion.” But in view of American reality, “religion” means Christianity. True, the term “Judeo-Christian” gained popularity in the 1950s, but it was adopted as an inclusive gesture, not a sociological observation. There can be no dispute that Christianity, especially Protestantism, has shaped American society. It is this legacy of influence over America’s laws, mores, and sentiments that is waning, as we all recognize.
What are we to make of the recession of Christianity from public life? Here, a great divide opens up. Those who identify as Christian are overwhelmingly likely to regard the trend as a bad one. Those who are not Christian hold the opposite view. They see Christianity’s diminished influence as a good development.
Readers will not be surprised to learn that the divide is a partisan one. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans (and those leaning Republican) regret religion’s declining influence, while only 33 percent of Democrats (and those leaning Democrat) do so. The divide is also generational. Younger respondents are far more likely to cheer Christianity’s decline than are older respondents.
The two sides don’t just disagree; they fear each other. The Pew researchers formulate a pointed contrast. One category, conservative Christians, combines those who identify as Christian with those who describe themselves as politically conservative. The other category, the secular liberals, combines the religiously unaffiliated with the politically liberal. Among conservative Christians, 73 percent say that secular liberals are too active and too influential in public affairs, especially in debates about public schools. Eighty-eight percent of secular liberals say the same thing about conservative Christians.
In the Pew survey, 27 percent of respondents fall into the conservative Christian category. That’s more than one quarter of all American adults. By contrast, only 12 percent are secular liberals. But as James Davison Hunter, Aaron Renn, and many others have noted, numbers do not translate into influence. Secular liberals may represent only one-eighth of the country, but they control our influential, mainstream institutions. Secular liberals determine what counts as “responsible” and what must be dismissed as “extremist.” For this reason, we live in what Renn calls a “Negative World,” one in which the most powerful people in society regard Christianity as an unfortunate legacy that must be suppressed.
The Pew survey also asked respondents about Christian nationalism. Pew reports that more than half of them have never heard of Christian nationalism. This group includes 60 percent of those who identify as Christian. Additionally, in the Christian cohort, only 5 percent report having heard “a great deal” about the topic. Put simply, Christians are not talking about Christian nationalism. The religious unaffiliated were more likely than Christians to have heard of Christian nationalism, and they were twice as likely to have heard “a great deal” about it (10 percent as compared to 5 percent). These results vindicate Kenneth Woodward’s assessment in this issue (“The Myth of White Christian Nationalism”): The ruckus over Christian nationalism has been astroturfed by the left. This made-up controversy keeps liberals in a state of frenzied anxiety about a looming theocratic takeover.
Persons, Not Property
Last month I noted the Alabama Supreme Court ruling in a case about the destruction of embryos. The embryos had been created by a fertility clinic. Some were implanted in women who had contracted with the IVF clinic. Others were frozen and stored for future use. In December 2020 a patient at the hospital where the clinic is located gained access to the storage unit, put his hand in, and grabbed some embryos, which were thereby destroyed. Three couples whose embryos were involved filed a civil lawsuit to collect damages, arguing that the IVF clinic had been negligent in failing to protect the stored embryos. They made their argument under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, which Alabama’s high court determined to apply in this case.
Uproar ensued. Progressives pounced on the ruling and broadcasted to the public that it represented an assault on the practice of IVF. Careful legal scholars have pointed out that the ruling is narrow. It concerns how to characterize the interests of couples who have engaged the services of fertility clinics. Are we to say that the embryos are the property of the couple? At first glance, pro-abortion zealots would seem happy to answer in the affirmative. But perhaps not, for such a judgment brings back unhappy memories of a time in American history when human beings of a certain race were treated as property.
Consider what the Alabama court had to adjudicate. The couples who litigated had had successful pregnancies by means of IVF. But imagine that one of the women had been hit by a drunk driver during her first month of pregnancy and suffered an injury that caused her to lose her child. She would be able to litigate for damages under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Are we to suppose, therefore, that the frozen embryos awaiting implantation are ontologically different from the implanted embryos, so much so that the embryos are “property” until such time as an adult decides to “use” him or her?
Although I regard the practice of IVF as wrong, I have sympathy for those who employ modern science in this way. The burden of infertility can be great. And I have pity, because men and women who engage in the artificial production of embryos are flirting with morally grievous matters. As the Alabama case brought to the fore, either the “products” of IVF are property or they are persons. To call the surplus embryos “property” indicates that IVF creates human life so as to manipulate and use it to suit the desires of adults. To allow that frozen embryos are persons forces us to confront the reality of IVF, which some experts say currently has one million persons on ice in the United States.
At the test of the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” We are on the cusp of a very different but equally daunting scientific revolution in reproductive technology. IVF and its Faustian manipulation of life are but the first act. Where is the Union of Concerned Scientists when we need them?
WHILE WE'RE AT IT
♦ Schoolchildren are being taught to diagram sentences: Authoritarianism is on the march. New Yorker writer Emma Green’s assessment isn’t so dire. But in her recent essay, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?,” she notes a decidedly right-wing tilt in the classical school movement. High school students in New York public schools read Michelle Obama’s memoir, while classical school kids read Aristotle and Dante. Critics are quick to deride classical education as the province of rich white folks. But in recent years, classical charter schools have opened in places like the South Bronx, with non-white parents clamoring for seats for their children. The assistant superintendent of a group of classical charter middle schools there expressed an old-school goal: “We’re building students that are not just going to be academic robots but moms and dads someday.” I can hear the outcries coming from faculty lounges: Patriarchy! Neo-fascism! Progressives are not wrong to worry. As Green observes, “In classical schools, inclusion isn’t necessarily the highest virtue.” That’s what happens when educators make truth-seeking the highest virtue.
♦ An amusing meme from social media: “Am I really a Nazi fascist extremist or am I just a normal person from 15 years ago?”
♦ David Rieff writes in his Substack column, Desire and Fate:
Huxley thought that people would need to be provided with the pharmacological equivalent of bread and circuses. But social media is a far more addictive compound for through it we have succeeded in accomplishing the seemingly impossible in the annals of enslavement . . . : becoming our own bread and circuses.
♦ The progressive commissars at Valparaiso University offered something interesting during Holy Week:
The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and the Office of Multicultural Programs, would like to celebrate Women’s History Month with all self-identified women, and non-binary people who are significantly female-identified at Valparaiso University. We invite you to take a break in your day and join us in a relaxing activity during this special month.
On Wednesday, March 27, 2024, we will be having two massage therapists available on campus to provide free chair massages to all faculty and staff. This is a great opportunity to relieve some stress, recharge your energy, and show some appreciation for all the hard work you do.
“Significantly female-identified”? Sanity seems in short supply at Valpo—but rest assured, “snacks will be provided.”
♦ On March 8, Irish voters rejected an elite-driven effort to amend the Irish Constitution. The proposed changes would have brought Ireland more completely into the Rainbow Reich. One change would have defined family as resting on “durable relationships”—in effect, cohabiting couples or, for that matter, any configuration. (The mainstream media have been fascinated by polyamory of late.) The other amendment would have replaced reference to a mother’s duties in the home with a more generic clause about care provided by family members. The vote was not close. Sixty-seven percent voted against adding “durable relationships”; 73 percent voted against striking the term “mother.”
Ireland’s political and cultural leaders were shocked by the outcome. Polling had suggested support for the changes. As it turned out, voters were hiding their true sentiments, which is not surprising, given the atmosphere of intimidation that silences and shames anyone who dissents from the Rainbow agenda. Before the vote, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (who has since stepped down as his party’s leader) said that a vote against the changes would be a “step backwards” and urged Ireland to put aside “very old-fashioned language” about women. Apparently, “mother” is a word that’s on the wrong side of history.
♦ I’ve long thought Portugal a vivid example of the decline that haunts the West. In the mid-1970s, a revolution overturned the decades-long rule of a civilian dictatorship, after which the leftist government renounced Portugal’s colonies. The country joined the European Union in 1986 and adopted the Euro in 1999. Now it is a vassal state in the European system, and few questions of economic or cultural consequence are decided in Lisbon. Brussels calls the shots. It’s quite remarkable: Portugal went from empire to colony in one generation. Apparently, Portuguese young people are unhappy. In early March, as the Irish were giving the Rainbow Gauleiters a black eye, their votes catapulted Chega, a new national conservative party, to a strong third place finish in Portugal’s national elections.
♦ A pithy (and true) observation from Fr. Robert Imbelli on the effects of liberal theology: No wrath + no sin + no Cross + no Christ = Nones.
♦ Fr. Imbelli is riffing on a famous line from H. Richard Niebuhr about theological liberalism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
♦ Against the notion that pivoting toward an “inclusive” approach to homosexuality involves only a limited modification of Christian morality, Larry Chapp argues that it implicates the Church in a profound change in theological anthropology, one oriented toward idolatry. Writing on his Substack, What We Need Now:
In other words, the entire LGBTQ movement is a counter religion, which accounts for why it is held with a deep religious fervor and why it is always accompanied by a deep loathing for the traditional Christian construal of the sacramental anthropology of the sex act. The rainbow flag is, therefore, much more than a mere symbol of sexual diversity but is also the central icon of a new religion.
♦ Darel Paul writing in Compact magazine:
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are counting on these under-30 (mostly) childless voters—especially women—to return them to office in November. This demographic contributes the shock troops of the Permanent Sexual Revolution. A clear majority of American women under 30 (61 percent) now identify as feminists, and pluralities of them say they are “not interested in dating” (43 percent) and that abortion should be legal “under any circumstances” (48 percent). No surprise, then, that Biden threatened the US Supreme Court in his recent State of the Union address with “the power of women.” Or that Harris visited a Minnesota abortion clinic this month, becoming the first sitting veep ever to do so.
♦ In his Back Page column last month (“Boundless Prayer”), Ephraim Radner commended the anchoring place of prayer, which is broad enough to have room for every aspect of our lives, good and ill. He cited Psalm 118:9. A careful reader wrote, observing that Radner surely meant Psalm 18:19: “He brought me forth into a broad place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.” Radner confirms that, yes, the correction is correct.
♦ In March we asked readers to support our planned redesign of firstthings.com. I’m delighted to report that as I write we have raised $49,691. Many thanks to our generous readership. Y’all are the best!
♦ To the end of improving all aspects of digital publication, we’ve hired Miguel Caranti to serve in a new position: systems architect. We’ve already benefited immensely from his dedication to our mission and his expertise.
♦ The annual Chicago Conversation will take place on the evening of May 15. I’ll sit down with Patrick Deneen to talk about liberalism, postliberalism, and the future of America’s political culture. Deneen’s most recent book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, outlines a program for restoring solidarity and renewing the American project in the twenty-first century. There will be plenty to talk about. You can register online at firstthings.com/events.
♦ The 2024 First Things Intellectual Retreat will be held in New York City, beginning with a dinner and evening lecture on Friday, August 9, and ending on the evening of Saturday, August 10. Participants complete assigned readings in advance, and Saturday is devoted to small-group discussion. Our topic this summer: Faith and Civic Responsibility. Register online at firstthings.com/events.
♦ Jon Fennell of Boise, Idaho, would like to form a ROFTers group. Become a founding member! Email jonmfennell@aol.com to join.
Daniel Pyke of Oakland, California, would like to start a ROFTers group in the East Bay. You can get in touch with him at dpyke16@gmail.com.
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
