Free Republic

If you think of American Christianity as a pendulum, we’re currently at the opposite extreme from the First Great Awakening. When Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he compared human beings with spiders, dangling by a thread over the fires of God’s just judgment, upheld only by His mercy. Accounts from the time tell of listeners who clung to the pillars of their churches, lest they fall through the floor into the Lake of Fire. Like I said, we’re no longer in this territory these days. In fact, according to Professor Michael...

This is just a very interesting map of the world. As a retired programmer, I would love to see the source code that produced these images. Link here: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-341.16,59.05,422 The word "Earth" visible in the lower-left corner can be clicked to show other "views" of the earth, from air and water currents to particulates in the air.

Why does propaganda sometimes stick — and sometimes not? Consider the Catholic kids who got strict Catholic dogma in the 1940s and 1950s. Most of them moderated or turned away from Catholicism altogether. While the nuns succeeded in teaching them to read and write, they couldn’t stop them from thinking for themselves. Yet with today’s millennial generation, most of whom attended America’s government-run schools under the ideologically left-wing Common Core curriculum, it’s quite different. Young people are running with the left-wing brainwashing, well into their 20s, 30s and maybe beyond. As Invenstor’s Business Daily writes, “Americans’ heavy flirtation with socialism...

Teleios conducted a survey regarding the benefits of Christian society on an Instagram account frequented by Christian adolescents and millennials. There were 565 responses. The majority of responders were: female (78%), <34 years (67%), primarily from the United States (60%) and evangelical (88%). Approximately half of respondents each indicated they live in a Christian versus a secular society. Further, the majority believed that living in a Christian Society was important, compared to a secular or other religious based society (41%), or at least compared to a secular society alone (18%). Participants noted the advantages of living in a Christian society...

Every time I see another disparagement of American history and American white males, I am poked to compose a list of their accomplishments that put everyone on the left to shame. The left's contempt for America is total – suggesting that leftists see nothing redeeming in who we are. This list should be burned into our memory to counter the left's fifty-year slander of American history. The advances on this list are the result of a unique degree of freedom blended with the Founders' exceptional knowledge of history that created a trickle-down effect in moral influence that no one can...

Victor Davis Hanson discussed the decline of the American academy, threats to Western civilization from within and without, “The Resistance” and its assault on the Trump presidency, and a great deal more with Encounter Books’ Ben Weingarten. Watch their interview here or read the full transcript of their discussion below, slightly modified for clarity. Ben Weingarten: As a classicist, you’ve lamented both the corruption of the academy within your own discipline and on the modern campus more broadly — in particular on its repudiation of the Western canon, its lack of adherence to principles of free inquiry and the overall...

William J Slattery calls for Catholics to do again what they did during the dark agesby Francis Phillips, 5 May 2018It is impossible to read Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build – and Can Help Rebuild – Western Civilization by William J Slattery (Ignatius), without being caught up by the author’s enthusiasm for his subject, alongside his evident knowledge and erudition. Starting in AD 200 he goes through the centuries, showing how priests (including bishops, saints and theologians) painstakingly brought a Christian culture to bear on the Dark Ages. As Lord Clark was to demonstrate in his television...

Jonah Goldberg has a new book coming out next week and today National Review published a lengthy piece adapted from the book. There’s a tremendous amount to unpack in this piece so I won’t even try to do it justice in a single blog post, but there is an idea here that really struck me as insightful and worthwhile: Conservatism is a form of gratitude. There’s a foundation to this idea. According to Goldberg, we’re living through a historical “miracle” brought about by the triumph of liberal-Democratic capitalism. On any longer time scale, Goldberg points out, our current lives are...

The only way to save Western civilization is to convince more people that leftism — not liberalism — is a nihilistic force. Quite literally, whatever the left touches it ruins. So, here is a partial listing of the damage done by the left and the Democratic Party: The most obvious — and, therefore, the one more and Americans can resonate with — is the near destruction of most American universities as places of learning. In the words of Harvard professor Steven Pinker — an atheist and a liberal — outside of the natural sciences and a few other disciplines (such...

One of the least known but most influential characters of early American history is the industrialist Samuel Slater. One of my significant resources in documenting Slater's life and work came from author George S. White, who, in 1836, published his book, Memoir of Samuel Slater: The Father of American Manufactures. I found White's book a fascinating account of early industrial America. In the introduction to Slater's memoir, while singing the praises of the industrious Slater – he's known today as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution," – Mr. White also speaks against the "Occupy" fools of the early 19th...

If you were to list the “greatest” nations in world history, you’d come up with some like the United States and Great Britain that are still doing fairly well. However, quite a few once great nations like Greece, Egypt, and Iran are sad, pathetic shells of what they used to be. Then there are the once formidable (and sometimes evil) empires like the Soviet Union, the Roman Empire, and Ottoman Empire which swallowed vast swathes of territory and then fell to pieces.How did nations that dominated their regions and, in some cases, projected power worldwide fall so far from grace?...

A common theme among progressives is that conservatives aren't just wrong; they're dumb. Reagan was dumb. G.W. Bush was dumb. Trump is dumb. "Knuckle-dragger," "mouth-breather," "stupid," and "uncultured" are typical pejoratives hurled at conservatives, who apparently tend to live in trailer parks, require dental care, handle snakes, and marry first cousins. Why, I had a liberal actor (excuse the redundancy) tell me once that I wasn't necessarily bad, just not as "evolved" as he was. (I had a great retort at the ready, but I decided just to lash him with my tail instead.) The reason for this arrogance isn't...

Hollywood, media, music industry, and political left-right Humanists are incapable of suspending their will-to-power, arrogant egotism fueled by an erroneous sense of 'moral' and 'intellectual' superiority or their scientism and evolution idolatry and a priori hatred of and contempt for President Trump, faithful Christians and Jews, middle class Conservatives, and the Christian-grounded America of its founding. Thus they are incapable of objectively considering the possibility that the ideology they religiously affirm is an unholy mixture of fantasy, scientism, lies, and evil and that a Scientific Dictatorship (NWO) – a global conspiracy run by super wealthy Western Luciferians and other pagan...

"On or about December 1910, human character changed," wrote British novelist Virginia Woolf in 1924. "I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless." Woolf's famous quote refers specifically to an exhibition of naturalist paintings. More broadly, 1910 marked the approximate date of a huge shift in the world of art: out went the traditional goal of creating beauty, replaced by the modernist goal...

For Christians, Christmas is a unique time of joy associated with the birth of the savior Jesus, whose life, death and resurrection makes possible a personal and intimate relationship with God. Jesus was born a Jew, and his teachings were built on the foundation of the Torah and the Old Testament. And so it is that Christians and Jews have much in common and share a natural mutual affinity. Christians and Jews have both faced persecution throughout history, and hostility is again intensifying. And that persecution comes not just from radical Islamists, but also from secular progressives who now dominate...

Today, we are increasingly faced with a contrived reality. A mirage. Images shone on a wall (television screens, cell-phone, laptops) portraying what our captors wish for us to believe (is reality). What is truth? Let me suggest that truth, increasingly, is a byproduct of force. Are any important matters reasoned true today, or are we stuck in a battle of messaging wills? In this, let me suggest, the Left are winning, as we’ve abandoned reason, and are left with, whatever message can be advanced enthusiastically enough, to run roughshod over the other. As Goebbels stated; “If you tell a lie...

Anti-racism is racism, too. How Progressives are risking the heritage of the Enlightenment — and the equality of citizens. Progressives style themselves the ones who regard human progress as a moral task. They intervene to force society into the direction they see as the only correct one. Magic words are: emancipation, integration and inclusion. They see themselves as the avant garde of global openness and tolerance. These same progressive comrades have become entangled lately in contradictions that give rise even among their leftist friends to doubts about the progressiveness of their positions. Is it not astonishing when logical secularists like...

When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, 500 years ago this week, he probably had no idea what forces he was unleashing. Although his intention was to spur reform within the Catholic Church rather than breaking off and starting a new church, he ended up accomplishing both. In fact, the Reformation started by Luther set in motion an awakening that stimulated an unusual concentration of human genius and extraordinary wisdom that would culminate in the birth of a new nation -- one unprecedented in human history, dedicated to upholding its citizens'...

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries. The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture. That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married...

For some years I have been convinced of the need for a Church-wide theological statement on sexuality. In fact, I actually wrote one that never saw the light of day. I was glad, therefore, to be invited to a day-long analysis of the proposed Nashville Statement, which appeared in public a few days later. Though some of us urged the inclusion of biblical references, this statement faithfully reflects the Scriptural teaching on human sexuality. This basic statement of biblical truth is crucial in our day of biblical ignorance. Since many evangelicals now use egalitarianism (no difference between males and females)...