At JPGB, reflections on the outstanding film Darkest Hour:

Words cannot produce the needed force by themselves, because the needed force is moral, and it transcends mere words. That is the abracadabra fallacy. But words rightly used are needed to transform moral truth into moral action.

I also reflect on history, which comes to us through kings and books, as the bridge that connects words to moral truth.

Don’t forget Mary and the Witch’s Flower – both are worth seeing on the big screen!

Thought y’all might like to see my comments on Mary and the Witch’s Flower over at JPGB:

Those who remain morally awake, who don’t lose their heads under the influence of grand ideologies, are those who combine a love of adventure and a love of ordinary life. Paradoxical as it seems, this is actually a very normal and logical combination. The dream of total control kills both the awe of an uncontrollable world that is the essence of adventure, and the unselfconscious, purely natural domestic affections. Adventure and comfort must both be spontaneous and unplanned. And of course it is the contrast with being at home that makes the road romantic. As G.K. Chesterton puts it, the boy at the center of the fairy tale must be ordinary for the tale to be extraordinary; Jack must be small for the giant to be gigantic.

See it on the big screen – it’s worth it!

My new series at TGR is on Martin Luther King’s address to junior high students six months before he was murdered, entitled “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” In the first post, I cover the important influence of Christian personalism on MLK’s address, and what it means for the faith and work movement:

Of course, King’s purpose is not to encourage narcissism. Today, our movement has to spend a lot of its time resisting narcissism – an inflated sense of somebodiness – because it serves a lot of highly advantaged people who have been told too much about how they are somebody and not enough about how they are responsible to others.

For King, it was all the other way around. His audience had been told all their lives that they existed to serve others. They were treated as mere instruments for others’ ends. King had to work hard to restore their sense of somebodiness.

Be a somebody and let me know what you think!

Today, Christianity Today carries my review of the new book Moral Combat, a history of culture wars over sex in the 20th century:

Sex is at the center of the culture wars because sex is essential to religion and also (as the basis of the family) to politics. Conflicting approaches to sexuality, caused by different religious views, create political conflict because they produce different understandings of the family. The family is the institution that connects individuals to the wider social world, so any major change in the life of families implies some kind of major political change as a result—and vice versa. We see this today in debates about the definition of marriage, but it was just as true in debates about birth control laws in the 1920s or sex education in schools in the 1960s.

I’m especially proud of this sentence:

She bends over backward to rescue Margaret Sanger and her movement from their creepy enthusiasm for eugenics; Griffith delicately remarks that they were “caught up in the eugenic ideas then common among the white middle and upper classes,” which is a little like saying Al Capone was caught up in the glamorization of organized crime then common in Chicago.

I argue that one major underlying cause of culture wars is our inability to build social organization on the family as the basic unit of society rather than the individual since we adopted women’s suffrage – which we were right to do, but which we did without an adequate plan for how to adjust our polity to preserve the family’s social role under the new regime:

Thankfully, we are no longer willing to deny women the equal political rights to which they are entitled. But we no longer know how to build our social order on the family rather than on autonomous individuals, and that is a potentially fatal flaw.

Let me know what you think!

Today I’m honored to be included in a Breakpoint symposium on challenges facing the church in 2018. Among the contributions, I don’t see any apologies for Trump or for giving up on the culture, but I do see a healthy tension between the imperatives to restore our credibility and seek reconciliation and the imperatives to stand up for truth and justice, mindful of the creeping totalitarianism that is the culture of death. It’s not a debate per se, but it’s also not simply harmonious. The peacemaker cannot say to the prophet “I have no need of you.”

My own contribution focuses on recovering a sense that religious freedom is a long, hard road that requires painful sacrifice:

Will we be humble enough to seek solutions to this dilemma whose ultimate aim is peaceful coexistence with those of other beliefs, even if that involves hard sacrifices and not getting our own way all the time? Or will we listen to the charlatans who whisper that our problems are all someone else’s fault, and we can make everything right again – without painful sacrifices on our part – if only we can defeat our enemies in political battle?

Also includes a shout-out to my man Whittaker Chambers – if you’re in the Grand Rapids area, I’ll be speaking about him at a lunch event on February 22 at the Acton Institute.

It’s great to see the conversations we need to be having are being had!