The Gorsuch Pick

  

President Trump’s choice of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court fulfills one of his campaign promises. Gorsuch, from all accounts I’ve read, will be a superb replacement for Antonin Scalia. Those who know him praise his keen mind and devotion to following the Constitution and not making up rights that don’t really exist. His record as a judge is stellar on issues of religious liberty. His explanations for his opinions (often as dissents to the prevailing liberal majority in his… Read more »

Trump’s First Days

  

Donald Trump’s first days in office have been filled with controversies—some genuine and created by him, others phony and played up by the usual suspects. Continuing my pledge to be fair and balanced in my comments on how Trump is doing, let’s begin with the phony ones. Because of his executive order that started the ball rolling on reversing Obamacare, we now hear hysterical rantings about how all the poor will lose their healthcare. Not so. A large portion of… Read more »

Critiquing Critiques: A Lewis Insight (Part 3)

  

When C. S. Lewis was completing his degrees at Oxford in the 1920s, he was being bombarded at that time with all the new ideas floating around the intellectual world. One of these was Freudianism. As with most young people, at first he was somewhat taken in by such new thought, but he later dismissed it as a false theory of psychology. All one has to do is read his The Pilgrim’s Regress to get his wonderfully scathing diagnosis of… Read more »

On Being a “Word” Guy

  

I’m a “word” guy, and becoming more so after writing two books in the past two years. I’m always looking for just the right way to say things, and I appreciate writers whose originality with words makes one rethink, or think more deeply, about life. That’s why I’m attracted to the wordsmithing of people like Whittaker Chambers and C. S. Lewis. It’s not just what they say—which is truth-hitting-you-where-it-helps/hurts-most—but the way they say it. Most of us have a hard… Read more »

Podcast of My Lewis Book

  

It’s here, the podcast I recorded with William O’Flaherty about my book on C. S. Lewis. In it, I provide background on why and how I wrote it, along with some explanation of the various chapters within. The podcast is only half an hour, well worth your time. I hope you find it both enlightening and entertaining, and that if you haven’t yet purchased the book, perhaps this will pique your interest enough to do so. Let me know what… Read more »

An Honest Appraisal of the First Weekend

  

On Friday, I pledged to be an honest appraiser of the new president and his actions, praising good ones and offering a critique for others not so good. Over his first weekend in office, President Trump gave me the opportunity to do both today. Let’s begin with praise. First, just seeing a photo of the Oval Office without its previous occupant is a relief for many of us. Second, Trump’s action in this photo is the beginning of fulfilling a… Read more »

Critiquing Critiques: A Lewis Insight (Part 2)

  

In my last C. S. Lewis post, I drew from one of his lesser-known essays entitled “On Criticism.” I find that it contains a number of great insights into how reviewers of books can fall into errors. The first error Lewis pointed out is that some reviewers simply don’t do the work necessary: they don’t read carefully and miss the mark on the actual facts contained in a book. A second error, according to Lewis, is when a reviewer attempts… Read more »