Books I’m Currently Reading or Re-Reading

 

Thankfulness is Good For Your Health…and it’s a Skill You Can Practice

Happy thanksgiving everyone! I want to take this opportunity to share two insights about thankfulness/gratitude that I came across when researching for my book Gratitude in Life’s Trenches: How to Experience the…

We Are Facing a Sex Recession…and It’s Not a Good Thing

Writing in The Atlantic, Kate Julian observed that we are in the midst of a sex recession. Her article, “Why Are Young People Have So Little Sex?” explored the paradox that despite…

Meta-Man Offers Existential Solipsism as the Ultimate form of Human Connection

For quite a while now, the technological oligarchs have been holding out the virtual realm as a world of limitless possibility, the path to individual and corporate flourishing. The virtuality-as-liberation narrative tells…

What Hath Virtue to Do with Vaccines? Putting Vaccine Mandates in Dialogue with an Ancient Ethical Tradition

Sometime in the modern age, ethics got off track. We stopped talking about virtues—character traits that are constitutive of human flourishing—and began focusing instead on the rightness or wrongness of actions, stripped…

COVID-controversies, Importance of Local Community, Facebook’s “Moral Bankruptcy,” and more

New posts have been uploaded to my weekly Salvo column, including articles on COVID-controversies, Facebook’s “moral bankruptcy,” and the importance of local community.

Mindful Breathing and the Safety of Stillness

From Gratitude in Life’s Trenches, page  95: “By letting your scattered attention rest with your breath, or with a simple prayer that you can synchronize with your breathing, you commit to embrace…

Modesty, Religion, and Sexual Fulfillment

The central thesis of Wendy Shalit’s classic  A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue is that, far from downgrading the significance of our sexuality, modesty upgrades and preserves it, keeping our elemental…

Learning About Sin from Milton’s Satan

At last week’s Touchstone conference, Tony Esolen gave a talk about Milton’s Satan, in which he unpacked some of the psychology of evil. In the course of his lecture, Dr. Esolen shared…

Two Fantastic Offers (plus pictures from Touchstone conference)

A very generous donor is underwriting all ebook purchases of Gratitude in Life’s Trenches for customers outside the USA and Canada for the two weeks from October 15-30. That means that if…

Train Crash Highlights Value of Community

Last Saturday afternoon seemed like an ordinary weekend for residents outside the sleepy town of Joplin, Montana. With a population of only 200, nothing much happens in this small farming community 150…

How I Came to Understand that Natural Rights are Fake

Regular readers will be aware that for some time I have been questioning the idea of natural rights. Natural rights are rights (things to which we are entitled) that are God-given, inalienable, a…



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