Aaron Renn: Hello, it's Aaron. Welcome back to the podcast. I have a special guest today, Luke Robson. He is the man behind Hillsdale Renaissance, which is a plan to revitalize the downtown of Hillsd… Read more ..read more

A reminder, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, April 26-28. Age Gaps in Marriage Flowing Data is a great data visualization site. It put together some great charts about age gaps in marriage. Click over to read this piece. Subscribe now Declining Possibilities Janan Ganesh wrote an interesting column in the Financial Times about the myth of the second chance. The surprise of middle age, and the terror of it, is how much of a person’s fate can boil down to one misjudgement. Such as? What in particular should the young know? If you marry badly — or ..read more

I have criticized David French for a number of things, but one area where he’s been right and was ahead of the curve is the problems facing men. While I disagree with some of his proposed solutions, he’s looking at the right problems, and, I believe, operates in good faith on this issue. One of his recurring themes is a call to men to pursue virtue. I think this important, but incomplete, as I outlined in a previous interaction with French on the topic. He returned to this theme in a recent column on how “The Atmosphere of the ‘Manosphere’ Is Toxic.” He’s definitely right that the manosphere h ..read more

Please read until the end for an important announcement about my monthly newsletter. Your identity is the foundation and the heart of everything. Because if you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what to do. One of the best examples of this is the Walt Disney animated film The Lion King (spoilers). The Lion King tells the story of a young lion named Simba. He’s the son of the king of the lions. His uncle is jealous of Simba and his father, and hatches a plot with the hyenas to kill them and take over the land. This plot succeeds, except for one thing: Simba himself escapes into the desert ..read more

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