My six-part video course on Six Arguments for the Existence of God is available for free from the Word on Fire Institute.  A short preview and sign-up information are available here.  An interview about the course can be read here ..read more

For those not following me on X (Twitter), some posts from the last couple of days attempting further to clarify what is at issue, and at stake, in the debate over the direction of the GOP ..read more

Readers who follow me on X (Twitter) will know of the intense debate occurring there over the last week between social conservatives critical of Trump’s gutting of the GOP platform and those defending it.  A pair of bracing, must-read articles at First Things and National Review recount how pro-lifers were brazenly shut out of the platform process.  For social conservatives to acquiesce out of partisan loyalty would be to commit assisted political suicide.  Today I posted the following, which elaborates on considerations I raised in an earlier article: A brief memo to social con ..read more

It is impossible not to admire the resilience and fighting spirit with which Donald Trump responded – literally within moments – to the failed attempt to take his life.  And that he is among the luckiest of politicians is evidenced not just by his survival, but by the fact that the moment was captured in photographs as dramatic as any seen in recent history.  His supporters are understandably inspired, indeed electrified.  And his enemies are sure to be demoralized by the sympathy this event will generate – not to mention the blinding contrast between Trump’s virility and the a ..read more

The latest issue of First Things features a symposium on the future of the Catholic Church, to which I contributed an article on the future of the Magisterium.  You can read the entire symposium online here ..read more

Though John Rawls wrote much that is of relevance to religion – and in particular, to the question of what influence it can properly have on politics (basically none, in Rawls’s view) – he wrote little on religion itself.  After his death, his undergraduate senior thesis, titled A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, was published.  Naturally, it is of limited relevance to his mature thought.  However, published in the same volume was a short 1997 personal essay titled “On My Religion,” which is not uninteresting as an account of the development of his religious bel ..read more

Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant both had an enormous formative influence on modern moral and political philosophy, and on liberalism in particular.  But their approaches are very different.  Hobbes begins with what strikes the average reader as a base and depressing conception of what individual human beings are like in their natural state, and sees society arising out of an act of cold, calculating self-interest.  Kant, by contrast, seems committed to a lofty and inspiring conception of human beings, and regards society as grounded in a respect for the dignity of persons. Cont ..read more

The paperback version of my new book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature sold out on Amazon within a day of being listed there.  No word on when it will be back in stock, but I imagine it will be soon.  Meanwhile, the eBook version is available through Barnes and Noble.  You can also order either version through the publisher’s website or through Amazon’s websites in the U.K. and Germany ..read more

Roger Scruton’s essay “Rousseau and the Origins of Liberalism” first appeared in The New Criterion in 1998, and was reprinted in The Betrayal of Liberalism, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball.  Among the many good things in it, there is an important expression and defense of the conservative understanding of tradition.  Scruton writes: Modern liberals tend to scoff at the idea of tradition.  All traditions, they tell us, are “invented,” implying that they can therefore be replaced with impunity.  This idea is plausible only if you take the trivial examples – Scottis ..read more

My new book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature is now available for pre-order in the U.S. at Amazon.com.  Here again are the back cover copy, endorsements, and table of contents: Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print.  Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptio ..read more