This article was originally posted at National Review Planned Parenthood and The Eugenics Movement Today’s medical innovation amid moral ambiguity echos that of a century ago. August 15, 2015 There is a haunting familiarity to the arguments defending Planned Parenthood’s sale of body parts from aborted babies for medical research: an echo of another era of medical innovation amid […]

This article was originally posted at CNN   Oxford, England  July 23, 2015 In his controversial encyclical on climate change, Pope Francis delivered a scathing critique of environmental degradation and called for “an ecological conversion” among fellow Christians. A century earlier, however, another environmental debate prompted its own version of soul-searching among the faithful. By the […]

This article was originally posted at Standpoint Magazine.   Undeterred, Erdogan Usurps Ataturk’s Legacy  July/August, 2015 Sahin Alpay, a Marxist-turned-social democrat and longtime advocate of liberal democracy in Turkey, was profoundly anxious about the upcoming national elections when I met up with him at the upmarket Marmara Hotel in Taksim Square a few days before the June […]

This article was originally posted at the National Review.   Italy Fell, Fascism Rose, Europe Reeled Remembering the Great War. June 24, 2015 Sorrento, Italy — Even here, in this coastal haven of sun-drenched serenity, there are reminders. In the center of the Piazza della Vittoria, overlooking the Gulf of Naples, is a monument to the victims […]

This article was originally posted at The Weekly Standard. Turkey, Islamism, and the West A setback for Erdogan. June 12, 2015 Istanbul Claiming victory for his Justice and Development party (AKP) in last week’s historic national election, Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu was defiant. “This election has shown that the backbone of Turkey is the AKP,” he told […]

This article was originally posted at The Weekly Standard. FDR at Yalta: Walking With The Devil March 2, 2015 Seventy years ago, on March 1, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt assured a war-weary nation that a new era of international peace and democratic government was at hand. The accords signed just weeks earlier at the Yalta Conference, he told […]

This book review of Greg Foster’s book “Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It” was originally posted at The Weekly Standard.   Love Thy Neighbor Being a good citizen and good Christian at the same time February 16, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 22 If liberal and secular-minded people […]

Originally posted at Standpoint.   Sixty years ago, C.S. Lewis delivered a hotly contested lecture at Cambridge University in which he identified “the Great Divide” that had seized the Western mind — and transformed it into something unrecognisable to earlier generations. On November 29, 1954, in his inaugural lecture upon assuming the Chair of Medieval and […]

As President Obama conducts an undeclared war on radical Islamists in Iraq and Syria, the commander in chief remains at war with himself.

The President’s weakness, deeply rooted in failed past administrations, is a surreal disaster for America and the world.