Tag: communism

Making Our Witness: The Chambers Model

  

What startled many readers of Whittaker Chambers’s Witness when it first was published in 1952 (and became a bestseller) was its deeply spiritual tone, its message of returning to faith in God, not only for the sake of individual salvation but also for the hope of salvaging Western civilization. Chambers had been a avowed atheist, an ideological stance influenced by his dysfunctional family upbringing, the nihilism communicated to him by his university education, and his commitment to changing the world… Read more »

Chambers, McCarthy, & the Real Thing

  

Whittaker Chambers brought credibility to the concerns Americans had after WWII that communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, were infiltrating American society. Chambers, as many regular readers of this blog know, had worked as a communist in the underground in the 1930s. He had labored to help the USSR place people in positions of authority in the American government, and he had served as a liaison with the USSR, sending US government secrets to that nation. So… Read more »

Willful Ignorance: Never a Safe Space

  

Nice to know that neither Obama nor Biden will make an appearance at Castro’s memorial. I don’t think that’s because they wouldn’t like to do so, but the backlash just might be greater than they wish to handle. Most people, outside of the press, aren’t exactly in mourning that the dictator is dead. Some have very good reasons not to feel particularly sad about it. The Castro legacy is not hard to discover: As I said in a previous post,… Read more »

Chambers, McCarthy, & Trump

  

An interesting question was posed to me yesterday by a former student, wanting to know what Whittaker Chambers might think of Donald Trump. I gave him my short answer but then decided it would be perhaps insightful to provide a fuller one here today. For those of you unfamiliar with Chambers, here’s a short synopsis of his life. Whittaker Chambers, in the 1920s, became a member of the Communist party because he saw it as the hope of a world… Read more »

Lewis & the Public Square (Part 3)

  

I’ve been sharing some of the paper I’m going to present at the upcoming C. S. Lewis Foundation summer conference. The theme of the conference is on how Christians can participate in the public square. The last section of my paper draws on Lewis’s insights on that matter. In my previous excerpt, Lewis was writing about some of the pitfalls of democracy. He continues in that vein: Lewis had an exchange on this issue with one of his regular American… Read more »

Chambers: Higher Education & Despair

  

What led Whittaker Chambers to become a communist? His university education was one source, not because it taught him communism per se, but because it offered nothing to believe in. Faced with a choice between nihilism and communism, he chose the latter. Here’s an excerpt from my new book that I hope you will find enlightening with respect to the decline of higher education. Chambers chose to attend Columbia University, close enough to home that he could save money by… Read more »

Chambers: Death of a Nation?

  

Those who have read this blog long enough know my affinity for Whittaker Chambers, a man I consider one of the true heroes in American history. That’s why he is one of the subjects of my new book The Witness and the President: Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, and the Future of Freedom. He had joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, thinking it was the answer to all the world’s crises. Only later did he come to grips with his… Read more »