For those of you in the area, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, April 26-28. This week I joined podcast discussions with Campus Fellowship and Roger Marsh about my new book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture. Jason Jewell also wrote a review of it for the Kirk Center’s University Bookman. Church and Gender In follow-up to my piece about a new survey showing that young women are now less likely to be religiously affiliated than young men, and that there’s increasing political polarization by gender, a reade ..read more

It’s common to complain, “What has conservatism ever conserved?” But a better question is to ask what it even wants to conserve. Postwar American conservatism has been described as a “three-legged stool” consisting of anti-communism (or a strong foreign-military policy), libertarianism (or classical liberalism), and traditionalism. The contents of traditionalism have changed a lot over the years, as I detailed in my recent essay for Fusion. I want to expand on that today to discuss three rival visions of what tradition is to be conserved: social conservatism, cultural conservatism, and bourgeo ..read more

The American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life recently released survey results showing that young women are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers. Over the last two decades, which witnessed an explosion of religious disaffiliation, it was men more than women who were abandoning their faith commitments. In fact, for as long as we’ve conducted polls on religion, men have consistently demonstrated lower levels of religious engagement. But something has changed. A new survey reveals that the pattern has now reversed.   Older Americans who left their childhood relig ..read more

Podcast transcript Aaron Renn: Hello, this is Aaron Renn. Welcome back again. I have a guest that I have wanted to have on the show for a very long time. I'm glad we were able to make it happen today.… Read more ..read more

My new book Life in the Negative World was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, and by Michael Perrone, who offers an LDS perspective. I also discussed the book on podcasts from First Things and Main & Gray. In a bit of sad news, Stephen B. Clark, author of the landmark book Man and Woman in Christ, died on March 16th. Bullish on Generation Z In response to my take that I’m actually bullish on Gen Z, someone sent me this Tech Crunch piece about a Los Angeles area tech accelerator called Discipulus Ventures, which mentors young founders to revive a Norman Rockwell vision of America. The ..read more

“Third way” rhetoric that has been deployed by some evangelicals was once praised but is now often criticized. People are rejecting the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle of left and right, or is some hybrid thereof. Today, even the evangelical proponents of third way rhetoric have adopted new language like “diagonalizaton” to suggest that the Christian truth is not simply somewhere in the middle but something else entirely. (I believe Christopher Watkin came up with this formulation). I actually think that a third way approach can be valid in a lot of circumstances in describing t ..read more

Podcast transcript: Aaron Renn: Hello, everyone. This is Aaron. Welcome back to the show. Got a great guest today, Peter Ostapko. He is the founder and editor of Kinsmen Journal, which is a great new … Read more ..read more

There’s a massive outcome gap between children growing up in two parent vs. single parent homes. The differences are so large, and the attempts to help kids in single parent homes so limited in their impact, that if we don’t reduce the share of children in single family homes, we are not going to make a dent in many of our social problems. This was my takeaway from my reading of economist Melissa Kearney’s influential new book The Two-Parent Privilege. As she wrote: Based on the overwhelming evidence at hand, I can say with the utmost confidence that the decline in marriage and the correspond ..read more

Generation Z gets a lot of bad press. We are constantly hearing about how smart phones have wrecked their psyches. We hear about how fragile they are, how much trauma they have, etc. Despite the very real problems Generation Z faces, I’m actually bullish on this generation. Every generation seems to get talked about negatively at first. “Kids these days” must be the oldest complaint in human civilization. Nothing could be more normal than having having challenges in high school. Nobody has it all figured out in college. I saw a stat that said only 4% of employers thought Gen Z was the most cul ..read more

Note: This interview was conducted two years ago. Podcast transcript: Aaron Renn: Hello. Welcome back to the show. I'm very excited today to have a very special guest, David Murrow, who is the author … Read more ..read more