Are Big Tech and social media entirely to blame for the triumphs of the erotic, the therapeutic, and the transgender? Of course not. But there is no question the dominant social media companies have seriously contributed to these trends.
18 search results for: carl trueman
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From Masks to Gender Ideology: The Political Power of Parental Pushback
The majority of parents are very angry about everything that has happened—not just the masking, not just the closing schools, but the combination of all of that. And it’s the fact that the people on the school boards, and Democratic politicians, by and large, just refuse to admit that this was wrong, and that it had consequences. And when they refuse to do that, why on earth would anyone vote for them again?
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Baptism and the Crisis of Modern Selfhood
Among the ruins of family and faith, amid gender deconstruction, surrounded by endless intersectional identities, and with countless constructed categories being hastily erected in their place, where can a sure and stable identity be found?
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Our Plastic World—And Plastic Selves
The collapse of traditional, external anchors of identity—perhaps most obviously those of religion, nation, and family—explains the attraction of the turn inward. The rise of technology feeds the notion that we can bend nature to our will, that the world is just so much raw, plastic material from which we can make whatever meaning or reality we choose. We no longer think of ourselves as subject to the world’s fixed nature, or of it as having an objective authority or meaning. We are the ones with power, and we are the ones who give the world significance.
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The Bookshelf: A Little Help from My Friends
Anyone who has spent his life in the academy, as I have, has reason to keep his mind open and his interests broad—namely, friends who write. My professional association over the last dozen years with the Witherspoon Institute and Princeton’s James Madison Program has introduced me to a dazzling array of brilliant and productive minds. No, I don’t want my writing friends to stop. They have given me much to ponder, and I look forward to what they will all write next.
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New, Old, and Obscure: Public Discourse’s 2021 Book List
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute’s staff.
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Augusto Del Noce and The Problem of Atheism
Augusto Del Noce is the most important thinker we don’t know. Del Noce viewed The Problem of Atheism, his essay collection that will be made available in English early next year, as the cornerstone of his scholarship.
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Are Women Still Human?
The issue of abortion cannot be reduced to the narrow question of the status of the child in the womb. The answers rest upon broader assumptions about what it means to be human. If we are to believe those who defend a right to abortion, it is nothing less than the power to end the life of her unborn child that guarantees a woman her humanity—that is, the autonomy befitting her status as man’s equal. That is a denial of what really makes us human: our natural dependence upon, and obligations towards, one another.
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Refreshing, Rejuvenating, and Improving Our Public Discourse: 2020 Book Recommendations
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
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The Road to Sexual Revolution: Carl Trueman and the Modern Self
According to Carl Trueman, focusing myopically on problems with sexual morality often results in misguided responses to the sexual revolution. Instead, we must grapple with “a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a self.”
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The Impact of Psychological Man—and How to Respond
Only by modeling true community, oriented towards the transcendent, can the church show a rapidly destabilizing world of expressive individuals that there is something greater, more solid, and more lasting than the immediate satisfaction of personal desires. The second in a two-part essay.
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The Rise of “Psychological Man”
The notions that human flourishing is found primarily in an inner sense of wellbeing, that authenticity is found by being able to act outwardly as one feels inwardly, and that who we are is largely a matter of personal choice not external imposition have become common intuitions that lie at the heart of our society’s many ills. The first of a two-part essay.
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The West is a Third World Country: The Relevance of Philip Rieff
Cultural conservatives face a time when it is not simply a question of debating the nature of our culture on some commonly agreed foundation. It is a time when we face the complete transformation of our culture into an anti-culture.
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A Protestant Look at the Dogmatic Timidity of the Current Roman Catholic Synod
Instrumentum Laboris points to a church that seems to be losing sight of sin, redemption, grace, faith, the sacraments, and eternal destiny. The Catholic Church could well be exchanging her theological birthright for a Mass of sociological potage.
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Thomas Aquinas: Not Just for Catholics Any More
A new collection of essays, Aquinas Among the Protestants, demonstrates the impact that Thomas Aquinas has had on Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed thinkers and explores the ways in which contemporary Protestant Christianity could benefit from Aquinas’s insights, particularly regarding natural law and virtue ethics.
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Understanding Generation Snowflake: “I Find That Offensive!”
Claire Fox’s book, “I Find That Offensive!” is a well-written, important, even brilliant contribution towards understanding the significance of current campus conflicts for society as a whole. Sadly, the picture she paints is bleaker than Fox herself realizes.
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Our Great Sexual Adventure: Where Does It End?
Though the sexual revolution’s stock is still rising, at the end of the day, this great adventure is going to end right back where it started: in classical sexual restrictions.
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Persecution, Past and Present: Candida Moss’s Unintentional Gift to Christians
Candida Moss’s book on the history of Christian persecution is a case study in how scholarship gives way to politicized polemic—but it’s also an important reminder for contemporary Christians.