J. Budziszewski

Why America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents By Guenter Lewy Eerdmans, 160 pages, $18 In its scant 160 pages, this book has everything: riveting argument and thrilling mystery sandwiched between an incoherency and a paradox. Apparently nothing in its writing went according to . . . . Continue Reading »

My first conservative experience was in second grade, when I learned America the Beautiful. Verses one and two were merely baffling: I could not picture waves of grain, I could not believe that mountains were purple, and I could not form an association between liberty and pilgrim’s feet. But the . . . . Continue Reading »

Believers in the congregation of my youth took for granted that Christianity and liberal politics were opposed. The Bible seemed to back them up; of Lyndon Johnson’s two great wars, for instance, they viewed the first, the war in Vietnam, with enthusiasm because America was a “City upon . . . . Continue Reading »

What is one to make of communitarianism? For a Christian, answering this question presents no small difficulty. Certainly Christians have no difficulty with community as such. At the core of our faith is the salvation story, and it turns out that without the notion of a people or nation-without the . . . . Continue Reading »

Laws politic, ordained for external order and regiment among men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his . . . . Continue Reading »

I Nietzsche claimed that if men took God seriously, they would still be burning heretics at the stake. In the same spirit, one supposes, are the notions that if men really cherished moral truth, they would suppress all beliefs that they considered wrong, and that if men still cared about the . . . . Continue Reading »