TV worth seeing: Blue Bloods, Season 1, Episode 15, “Dedication” is well worth your time. One of the finest depictions I’ve seen of how respecting all bonds is consistent both with fierce protectiveness and tender mercy.

Love and justice are always kissing, folks. Never compromising their characters, sure that they are truly one in the all-good, all-true, all-beautiful Creator and Redeemer.

If you think you one of those gets you a pass on the other, you’re neither loving nor just.

When an entire continent that is—to repeat—healthier, wealthier, and more secure than ever before ceases to produce the human future in the most elemental sense of “human future”—by refusing to have children—something is seriously awry. Something has gone dry in the soul. Whatever the economic , ideological, and cultural pressures involved, a lack of generosity toward the future is manifesting itself in willful barrenness. And that is, in the broad sense of the term “human spirit,” a spiritual problem. Indeed it is a spiritual crisis.

(source: Letter Number Ten | Xavier Rynne II, ed. | First Things)

Today, TGC carries my review of Joseph Loconte’s wonderful new book about how the religious/political cataclysm of the Great War and its aftermath shaped the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis:

Recently I finished reading my daughter The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was her first time hearing the story; it was my first time reading it since I read Joseph Loconte’s delightful yet sobering A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War...The highest compliment I can think of to give this book is that Loconte…has revealed to me new depths in Narnia, as well as in Middle-Earth and the Space Trilogy.

I’d been aware—who could miss it?—that all three were written in reaction against the de-Christianization of Western culture. The most delightful moment of Loconte’s book for me was this vignette: Lewis wrote the first book of the Space Trilogy in 1938 to confront readers with the biblical doctrine of the fall, and was dumbfounded when he discovered that no one who read the book saw the biblical connection. Rather than give up in despair, he concluded the public was now so theologically ignorant that, as he wrote to a friend, “Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance.” The rest is history.

As I write at TGC, while the book is insightful on Tolkien and Lewis, I think its greatest service is to help recover some historical memory of the religious and political significance of the Great War – over the past few years I have become more and more convinced that the early 20th century was the great pivot that created our present historical situation. As always, your comments are welcome!

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury of History, let the record show that Rick Perry was something more than merely the hands-down best governor of his generation:

Early in the Republican presidential primary in 2012, there was a televised debate. The candidates were seated around a table. As the debate unfolded, many of the candidates were furiously writing down notes, to remind themselves of a point they wanted to make. One candidate, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, noticed that Perry wasn’t writing very much. Through the course of the debate, Santorum told the story of the tremendous health challenges that his daughter Bella, who suffers from a rare disease, had faced through her life. It was a touching story. As the debate ended, the candidates stood up and shook hands. Santorum walked over to Perry and glanced down at his paper and saw just three words: Pray for Bella.

The article’s written by a former rival of Perry’s in the hotbed of Texas GOP infighting. The whole thing is worth your time.

Among the 40 percent of GOP primary voters who say they are evangelical or born again, Trump only polls 25 percent compared to his 38 percent support among all other GOP primary voters. Even that overstates the amount of Trump support you would find in an evangelical pew on Sunday morning. Of those evangelical GOP primary voters who go to church at least once a month (80 percent of that subgroup), Trump polls just 21 percent. By contrast, among those attending church less frequently, Trump doubles his support.

(source: Evangelicals Don’t Love Trump)

As I’ve already commented on Facebook:

For those of you who have been looking left and right for those elusive hordes of people who support this foul imposture on account of their evangelical fervor–yes, as we’ve been telling you, this is another lie made up by people who make up stuff to deceive you for a living. Are you even surprised?

Is it OK with you to live in a culture like this?
“Oh, advertisements lie? ho hum.”
“Oh, politicians lie? of course they do.”
“Oh, the news lies? sure, but they’re invaluable props to democracy for some reason.”

It should not be. What will you do to make truth triumph in our world?

Hint: it does not start by agitating in favor of imposture and chicanery writ large.

source: Trump-Support-Age.png