Stephen H. Webb

Wendell Willkie is back in the news these days in Indiana, thanks to Mary Beth Dunnichay. She is the youngest American Olympian and the only other famous person to be claimed by Elwood Indiana, population 9,096. Dunnichay is a fifteen-year-old synchronized diver. Willkie was the Republican nominee . . . . Continue Reading »

Address written for entering students of Wabash College, Class of 2012 Christians believe that God became human in Jesus Christ. If so, it follows that there is something called humanity. That is, humans have a nature, a shared or common nature. Human nature is not just a social construction. Human . . . . Continue Reading »

Defenders of the separation of church and state deplore no period of Christian history more than the Constantinian epoch. They suspect that Constantine made the world safe for Christianity only by making Christianity a danger to the world. Christian soldiers replaced bleeding martyrs as the altar . . . . Continue Reading »

A cult can be defined as a tight knit group of people who devote themselves to a charismatic leader who promises to solve all their personal or social problems by the power of his personality. Given that definition, I would argue that the Obama campaign has all the marks of a cult. First, Obama . . . . Continue Reading »

The dirty Darwinian secret is now out of the closet: If evolution is true, then it must be true about everything. Most Darwinians used to be very restrained about the relevance of their theory for cultural and moral issues, for obvious reasons. If evolution is true about everything, then randomness . . . . Continue Reading »

After years spent trapped in the academic equivalent of a singles bar, eagerly courting any discipline, no matter how unattractive the results, theologians have been trying to recover their reputation by being more particular about the company they keep. So how are we to explain a book like . . . . Continue Reading »

Sacred Order / Social Order, Vol. 1, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority by Philip Rieff. University of Virginia Press, 234 pages, $34.95. Reading Philip Rieff is hard work. In Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks , he develops a deceptively . . . . Continue Reading »

The New York Times has finally caught on that there is a gender crisis in America that concerns men, not women. That is hard for much of the media to absorb, given the dogmas of feminism, with its perpetual battle against intransigent sexist forces. Even at my college, which is one of the last . . . . Continue Reading »

Why do so many people these days sound like conservatives but still insist they are liberals? I recently had a conversation with a female lawyer who spoke as if she had just finished reading Oswald Spengler. When she learned that I was a college professor, she unleashed a torrent of vitriol against . . . . Continue Reading »

Cultural studies, postcolonialism, and postmodernity have so completely corrupted higher education that one wonders if their infiltration of English departments beginning some twenty years ago was a right-wing plot. The unreadable jargon, coupled with a seamless blend of utopianism and cynicism, . . . . Continue Reading »