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Results matching: 10
Is the answer retreat? Is today’s modern liberal culture too far gone to save? Have we invested “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” in a project that is not worth the former two, much less the first? Perhaps this is not the exact, word-for-word argument that columnist Rod Dreher makes, but it certainly appears to be something close to it. In The Benedict Option, Dreher takes us back in time to examine the life and example of St. Benedict and his band of reclusive followers, arguing that the community they formed is exactly the kind of community in which we should participate—and the kind of life for which we should be willing to die.
Dreher begins his argument with intellectual history, describing the twin forces of reason and faith—represented by Athens and Jerusalem—as guiding the Church and society through the Middle Ages. It is within this context that the life of Benedict and his monks, living for Christ as a community rather than merely as individuals, takes place. Dreher continues his intellectual chronology with the thought and life of St. Thomas Aquinas. Coming from a Protestant background, I am compelled to concede the greatness and intellectual seriousness of the man who is likely the premier theologian and philosopher not only of his period but extending into the present day. One of Dreher’s most important strengths is his ability to appeal to authorities such as Aquinas when making the case for Christian philosophical realism. Nor does Dreher resort to blaming the typical villain of anti-Enlightenment Christian critiques, René Descartes. Although he mentions Descartes, Dreher critiques not his methodology but the thinkers who followed him. Rather than blaming Enlightenment figures directly for current skepticism, Dreher instead points to William of Ockham, the father of nominalism, as the source of the problem. Let me explain.
Dreher posits that two rival worldviews were at work during the High Middle Ages, which have since split philosophical discourse into two nearly unbridgeable camps. The first, Christian realism, is associated with Thomas Aquinas and, earlier, Aristotle. This view holds that real, discoverable truths exist and are grounded in God. In other words, a tree is genuinely real, present, and accessible to the senses, but ultimately ordered within a meaningful and purposeful reality. This was the dominant view for centuries following Aquinas’s death. In contrast, William of Ockham proposed nominalism—the view that things do not possess inherent reality, causality, or necessity. Reality becomes fragmented into isolated parts, and meaning is no longer embedded in the world but is instead fluid. While nominalism leaves room for God, it undermines the idea of God’s unchanging nature. For Ockham and his intellectual descendants, the qualities of nature are not necessary but contingent. God could have just as easily commanded Moses, “Thou shalt kill,” if He had so chosen. The key difference lies in the nature of meaning: for realists, meaning exists independently and is discovered; for nominalists, meaning is constructed. Dreher sees this shift as the catalyst for the modern struggle between objective meaning and subjective self. His argument is that once society rejected realism and embraced nominalism, the checks and balances that governed both society and meaning itself began to unravel, piece by piece.
The solution, Dreher proposes, is not political engagement. He argues that such efforts have failed. In a sense, he calls for retreat—perhaps into local communities, perhaps even into something resembling monastic life. However it is framed, engagement with an increasingly counter-Christian culture is not, in his view, the answer. The problem with this is that Christians are called to be the “salt and the light” of the earth. Classical teachings hold that Christians remain in the world as a counterbalance to evil. It is through engagement with a fallen world that redemption is pursued. Dreher overlooks this in his advocacy for intentional Christian communities. While such communities are not inherently wrong, his emphasis neglects a significant part of the broader picture.
Secondly, Dreher significantly overestimates the ability of community to preserve truth. While he is correct to reject the nominalism of William of Ockham, he veers toward the opposite extreme, failing to adequately account for the free will of individuals to accept or reject biblical mandates. Community, though valuable, cannot guarantee faithfulness. Because of human fallenness, no structure—no matter how well-ordered—can serve as a safeguard against error. Dreher himself concedes that community is not salvific. Yet by placing such weight on retreat and communal life, he effectively elevates it beyond its proper role, risking a subtle shift away from personal responsibility and active witness in the world.
The final problem with Dreher’s argument is that, although he is overly optimistic about humanity’s ability to achieve harmony within community, he simultaneously underestimates humanity’s capacity to act in accordance with natural law—especially when the survival of culture itself is at stake. His claim that the answer no longer lies in voting for political candidates risks creating a false dichotomy. The truth is that the answer never lay solely in political engagement. Both Christian theologians and the American founders understood that political involvement, while necessary, is not sufficient. We can agree with Dreher that “politics is not the solution,” but we must also insist that “retreat into community is not the solution either.” In avoiding one ditch, Dreher has driven into another. There have always been those who spread fear and predict impending collapse. Perhaps such collapse is near. But even if our systems are irredeemable, our institutions corrupt, and our world deeply fallen, the answer is not withdrawal. It is to stand and act—even if such action appears futile—so that we cannot be said to have remained silent.
It is important to avoid misrepresenting Dreher’s argument. He does not advocate burying our heads in the sand or withdrawing entirely from political life. In fact, he encourages continued support for causes such as the right to life, traditional marriage, and core tenets of Christian conservatism. Dreher is not unpatriotic, despite how his argument may sound. He clearly loves America and its people; more broadly, he values Western civilization and seeks to protect it from forces he believes are eroding it from within. The issue lies less in what Dreher explicitly argues and more in how his argument may be interpreted. He is correct to point out that many of our current solutions are ineffective. However, where he errs is not in diagnosing the problem, but in his response. Like others in the post-liberal movement, he risks rejecting the very system that allowed the problem to emerge—and that may still contain the means for its resolution. The problem is not classical liberalism or our system of government. Nor is it that we mistakenly believe politics alone is the solution. Rather, the problem lies in expecting too much from imperfect systems and people. It lies in demanding perfection from a fallen world and then abandoning it when that expectation is not met.
What, then, is the verdict? Is The Benedict Option worth reading? Yes—with important caveats. The book succeeds not so much in accomplishing its stated aim, where it ultimately falls short, but in establishing the necessary groundwork for a broader discussion. Dreher’s real contribution is that he forces readers to confront where things may have gone wrong and to consider possible solutions together. This conversation, as Dreher himself suggests, should take place within communities—but without idolizing community, dismissing political structures, or denying individual responsibility. The Church was not called to survive history by retreating from it, but by confronting it—generation after generation—not with certainty of victory, but with certainty of truth. That is where we must stand.
Review Written by C. A. Gerber
April 24th, 2026
Wright's Surprised by Hope is one of the most clarifying and theologically bracing books a Christian can read on the subjects of resurrection, eschatology, and the Christian life. Wright, the Bishop of Durham turned prolific New Testament scholar, dismantles centuries of accumulated Platonic distortion and replaces it with a robustly biblical vision. Frankly, it is more surprising and more exciting than the thin gruel of “going to heaven when you die” that passes for Christian hope in most pews.
The heart of the book is a recovery of what Wright calls “life after life after death.” The intermediate state of the soul with God between death and resurrection is real, but it is emphatically not the destination. The destination is bodily resurrection into the new creation, the renewal and transformation of the present cosmos, not its abandonment. Wright marshals the New Testament with characteristic precision: Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection appearances in the Gospels, the “new heavens and new earth” language of Revelation and Isaiah—all of it points to a God who redeems and transforms rather than discards.
This is positive eschatology in the truest sense. Creation is not a holding pen for souls waiting to escape; it is the theater of God’s redemptive purposes, groaning toward glorification. The resurrection of Jesus is not a proof-of-afterlife miracle standing alone; it is the first installment of the new creation breaking into the old. Christian hope, then, is not evacuation; it is the anticipation of a world made right.
This eschatological reframe has direct ethical consequences, and Wright presses them hard. If God is going to renew creation rather than incinerate it, then what Christians do in and with the physical world now genuinely matters. Work, art, justice, care for the poor, beauty—these are not distractions from the “real” spiritual business of soul-saving. They are acts of anticipation, small foretastes of the coming kingdom, contributions to what God will ultimately complete.
Wright is careful not to collapse into a social gospel; he insists the resurrection is the foundation, not political activism. But the directional thrust is clear and salutary: a Christianity that ignores the body, scorns creation, and retreats from culture has been infected by Gnosticism, not formed by the New Testament. The Christian vocation is to be “resurrection people” who live in the present order as though the future has already broken in because, in Christ, it has.
Wright's treatment of the sacraments flows naturally from his broader argument. Baptism and the Eucharist are not merely memorial ceremonies or spiritual hygiene; they are enacted declarations of the new creation. Baptism signifies dying and rising with Christ, a bodily, material act that marks the participant as belonging to the age to come. The Lord’s Supper is the place where the church meets the risen Lord in the breaking of bread, a meal that is simultaneously backward-looking (to the cross), present-tense (communion with the risen Christ), and forward-looking (the marriage supper of the Lamb).
Wright resists both bare memorialism and a rigid scholastic transubstantiation, landing in a sacramental realism that trusts the physical elements to bear genuine spiritual weight without requiring a particular philosophical mechanism to explain how. His approach is characteristically Anglican in the best sense: grounded, liturgically serious, open-handed on metaphysics, and deeply christological.
Surprised by Hope is, at its core, an argument that Christians have been telling themselves a diminished story. Wright’s corrective is not innovation but excavation, digging back to the first century to recover what the apostles actually meant when they said “Jesus is risen.” The result is a vision of hope that is larger, earthier, and more demanding than anything that fits on a bumper sticker.
Review Written by Gabriel Herrmann
March 15th, 2026
Why is it that today’s shepherds know little about sheep?
In this book, pastor and author James Collins takes our contemporary interpretations of Psalm 23 and sweeps them into the dustbin, then carefully crafts a new, and I would argue more radical, approach to how we should truly approach such a significant biblical passage.
Setting it in its context within the book of the Psalms, Collins reminds us that it is placed between two Messianic psalms. Certainly, David did not know who he was writing of when he spoke of the Shepherd, for it was indeed the Lord—but it was a specific Lord: the Lord Jesus, who had not yet been revealed in full when David wrote the now-famous words.
Moving beyond mere platitudes, Collins’ genius lies in his ability to combine deep theological lessons with Southern wit and personal experiences, without getting the reader lost either in the theological definitions of so many other works on theological matters or in making light of the things of God. In reality, when you read this book, a theological treatise is exactly what you are reading, yet you may well deny it, for it feels more like you are reading the reminiscences of a Southern preacher—which, in a way, you are.
Not only does Collins include everyday experiences and stories that impart rich practical meaning, but he also includes many symbolic details of which Christians today are woefully ignorant. It is easy to conclude, from reading this, that the author did massive research into the symbology behind the Lord as a shepherd, and he writes in this book of the many parallels between the needs of sheep and the tasks of the shepherd, in contrast to the needs of humans as sheep who need a master, and the tasks performed by the Shepherd and Master. Remarkably, the symbolism is neither stretched nor overdone, and the images portrayed do not go further than an explicitly biblical and orthodox interpretation.
That said, at times the book can feel overly simplified. This is by no means a fatal flaw, nor even an unexpected one given Collins’ pastoral aim, but it does raise the question of whether clarity has occasionally been purchased at the expense of depth. While the avoidance of dense theological terminology makes the work accessible, there are moments when the reader may wish for a more rigorous engagement with the underlying doctrinal issues that the text inevitably invites. Thus, my recommendation is simple: if you wish to move beyond the platitudes of normality, then this is the ideal book. If you wish to move into the profundity of theology, then this is not it. The purpose of this book is not to educate the educated, but, as I perceive it, to call the uneducated to a fuller and more accurate understanding of the truth claims of Christianity.
Collins does not offer a theological tower, but he reminds us of the base upon which such a tower must inevitably be built. It is a call for each of us to remember that only when we recognize that we are sheep can we recognize who our Shepherd is.
Review Written by C. A. Gerber
March 12th, 2026
There is a crisis in the Western church, and Zachary M. Garris is not interested in beating around the bush. In Masculine Christianity, Garris makes the case that the church's slow accommodation to feminist ideology has not been a neutral cultural adjustment; it has been a theological surrender, one with consequences that ripple outward from the pulpit into the home and society at large. It is a bold argument, and one that deserves to be taken seriously.
Garris’s central contention is straightforward: God has not left men and women without direction. Scripture speaks clearly about the distinct roles, responsibilities, and authorities given to each sex, and the church’s drift away from these teachings has not made it more loving or more relevant; it has made it weaker. Masculine Christianity is, at its core, a call to recover what was never supposed to be lost.
What makes this book worth reading is that Garris does not treat masculinity as a cultural preference or a personality type. He roots it in theology. The authority a husband exercises in his home, the leadership a man provides in his church, and the responsibility he bears in society—these are not artifacts of a bygone era to be quietly retired. They are divinely ordained structures, and abandoning them has costs. Garris is right to press this point, and he does so with clarity and conviction rather than apology.
The book is also refreshingly honest about the scope of the problem. This is not merely a matter of a few liberal congregations going astray. Garris identifies the embrace of feminist assumptions as widespread across evangelical and even ostensibly conservative church culture. The softening of male headship, the sidelining of male leadership, and the reframing of biblical gender roles as culturally conditioned rather than scripturally grounded—these trends have touched nearly every corner of the Western church. The diagnosis feels accurate, and that accuracy is itself valuable. You cannot address a problem you are unwilling to name.
On the positive side of the ledger, Garris is equally clear. The alternative to a feminized church is not a caricature of domineering men barking orders; it is men who take their God-given responsibilities seriously—men who lead their families with love and intentionality, men who step into their churches not as passive attendees but as engaged shepherds and servants, and men who understand that authority and sacrifice are not opposites but are bound together in the biblical vision of manhood.
The principles he articulates—the complementarity of the sexes, the headship of the husband, the importance of male leadership in the church, and the social consequences of getting gender wrong—are not novelties. They are historic Christian beliefs, confessed and practiced across centuries and traditions, before the present moment of confusion set in. Garris’s project is essentially restorative, and there is something deeply sensible about that. The answer to theological drift is not innovation; it is return.
Readers looking for a thorough academic treatment of every relevant passage or a deep engagement with opposing scholarship will want to supplement this volume with additional resources. But that is not entirely what Garris is after. Masculine Christianity functions more as a clarion call than an exhaustive systematic treatment, and on those terms it succeeds. It is direct, blunt, and readable, and it arrives at a moment when directness is badly needed.
The church does not need another round of accommodation. It does not need to find more comfortable language for timeless truths or more palatable framings for unpopular doctrines. What it needs is what Garris is calling for: the willingness to take Scripture at its word, to trust that God’s design for men and women is not a liability but a gift, and to build accordingly. Masculine Christianity makes that case with urgency and conviction.
For readers who sense that something has gone wrong in how the modern church talks about men, women, and gender—and who suspect the answer lies not in further revision but in faithful recovery—this book is well worth your time.
Review Written by Gabriel Herrmann
March 30th, 2026
Secularists are prone to portray the battle over worldview as a conflict between the outdatedness of religious belief and the science of progress, but what if this dichotomy is not only false, but completely reverses the reality of reality itself? Jeffrey D. Johnson sets out to prove in his book, The Absurdity of Unbelief, not only that Christianity is a viable alternative to the worldviews and religious dogmas of our world today, but that it is the only comprehensive system of thought that accurately relies upon the use of reason as proof, and not an obstacle to the radical claims made by the Biblical account.
To read this book does not require a degree in advanced philosophy or theological thought, though it does require a clear head, a concentrated mind, and a willing spirit, as well as a healthy dose of caffeine. Jeffrey Johnson does a masterful job not only at defending his central thesis, but at anticipating objections to it, and addressing them properly.
Beginning, in part one with a critique of the significant worldview of today, including those which would seem to the naked eye to not conflict with the truth claims of Christianity -such as Pascalian existentialism-, but which in reality are a substantive threat to the progress of the gospel.
As Johnson writes in the introduction to the book: “Because all non-Christian worldviews are indefensible, it is not sufficient for skeptics to attack Christianity without also defending the foundation for their own unbelief. Everyone has a worldview, even atheists and skeptics, but only the Christian worldview is not self-contradictory.” The author digs into the premises upon which the rival religions that threaten Christianity are based, and with Schaefferian rigor exposes them as frauds, self-contradictory theses which are indefensible from the start when we clearly identify what they state and why they state it. From naturalism to existentialism, to Nietzschean nihilism, Johnson progressively shows the decline, or devolution of these worldviews, not as coherent systems of truth, but as intellectual cul-de-sacs that collapse under the weight of their own presuppositions. When followed to their logical conclusions, Johnson argues, these systems ultimately undermine the very tools they depend upon. Naturalism erodes the basis for reason itself by its denial of a designer or law-giver; existentialism dissolves truth into subjective preference; nihilism, as articulated by figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, leaves humanity stranded in a universe devoid of meaning or moral grounding which calls into question the very reason for which they proposed their system of thought in the first place.
In part two, Johnson illuminates the truth on some of the greatest objections to systemic Christian theology; from the Trinity to the reliability of Scripture, and the bogeyman called Evil. Destroying both the dualistic Christianity which sees evil as an equal force with good -in a very Thomist way, though the author, an avowed anti-Thomist would reject the label-, and the existentialist experience-based faith that treats reality as that which is true for the inner self and ultimately leads to the Christian nihilism of figures like Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, Johnson instead proposes the central thesis of Christianity as a revelation of reality, and reason as an instrument, and not a master of the created order. Using the presuppositional apologetics approach of Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til -a system, which, as a classical theistic apologist, I find problematic but still useful-, Johnson sheds light on the fact that the doctrines of Christianity are not simply doctrines, but facts. The Trinity, as an example, is, by necessity present, for, if God is love, and to love implies a lover and one who is loved, then it is necessary that God should have loved prior to creating us; yet who else could He love if he was not the trinitarian God presented in Scripture?
What appears mysterious, he argues, is not therefore contradictory; rather, the difficulty often lies in humanity’s limited understanding of divine realities. The doctrines critics most often dismiss as absurd, are the doctrines which provide the basis for a coherent worldview and systematic form of belief. Unbelief, and not belief, is absurd, irrational and self-destructive. The choice, argues Johnson, is not between faith and reason, not between religion and science, but between rationality and irrationality, truth and falsehood, light and darkness.
Review Written by C. A. Gerber
March 15th, 2026
A critique of modern conservative jurisprudence from a legal scholar and natural law expert. Hadley Arkes makes the argument that conservatives have been failing not because they don't have good arguments to make, but because they aren't making them. We have borrowed turf from our enemies, using their legal positivism as a defense of life and constitutional liberty instead of rejecting it as wholesale nihilism in the realm of jurisprudence. It isn't working, Arkes makes clear. The solution, he argues, is not to return to the moral ambiguity of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, but to go back still further, to the Founders of our nation, who recognized that even without a Constitution, without a Bill of Rights, without a Declaration of Independence, our rights would still exist, and would still be necessarily defensible, because, ultimately, they are founded on the unchanging law of righteousness, as President Calvin Coolidge wrote.
We must stop our treatment of moral rights as if it were a question of judicial propriety. Courts cannot avoid making moral judgements; the question is not to judge or to judge not, but rather to judge rightly, or to judge wrongly; and what we base our judgements on. What the court bases its judgements on cannot be only the law of a certain state or the letter of the Constitution; rather, Arkes understands the spirit of the laws. It was the reason for which the Constitution was drafted; the reason why the colonists of our nation broke with the British Empire. It was the reason that the founders of our nation could understand the same principles as we today can and do, yet they, of course, did not have the Constitution to guide them; they had only their souls, their inner conscience, the realization that all laws come from The Law.
Arkes makes several further points, arguing strongly against a “States' rights” understanding of abortion, and rather as a fundamentally moral issue. He also spends several chapters of this book contrasting the segregation of the twentieth century with the abortion of the twenty-first, and the Supreme Court’s correct decision but with flawed reasoning on both issues. Some of the points which he makes may seem controversial to the more libertarian-minded reader; he does not hesitate to argue that the state should punish some forms of what he terms “hate speech”—including, interestingly, the use of profanity in a public setting. While this may seem polemic, Arkes defends his thesis well, and the facts and data he uses are substantive.
Ultimately, this book is one that those interested in jurisprudence and law should read with open eyes, open ears, and open hearts; we may reject some of the conclusions he arrives at, but as an intellectually rigorous work, with flawless logic, the ultimate conclusion, the end destination at which all the strings tie together, is a conclusion that is impossible to dismiss.
Review Written by C. A. Gerber
March 7th, 2026
Two great men. Two classics. And a war that brought it all about.
In The War for Middle Earth, Tolkien scholar Joseph Loconte takes a deep look into the defining conflict of the twentieth century and how it shaped the lives, the works, and the ideas of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. One, a Catholic philologist; the other, an atheist turned Christian apologist, both realizing that the Second World War was not simply a conflict between two entities seeking territorial domination. Rather, it was a conflict between the forces of good, of Western civilization, of honor and of virtue, facing off against the forces of evil represented by totalitarian Germany and, later, Soviet Russia.
Interviewing noted historians of this period, including Sir Niall Ferguson, Loconte looks not only at how the war shaped their perceptions of the world, but how the perceptions of the pre–WWII world shaped the war. Following the killing fields of the Great War, in which both men lost friends, the entire world seemed to reel. Why was war even necessary? Thus, pacifist groups and anti-war advocates began their slow climb to the zenith of their power, to utterly disastrous consequences. Unnerved by his experience in the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien nonetheless realized that sticking his head in the sand would not take away the threat from totalitarian states. To blind oneself to the truth of evil would not make evil blind itself to the truth of good and to its attempt to conquer it.
Loconte does a good job of portraying the grueling reality of war, not as a glorious conflict in itself, but as one which, though bloody, has the potential for glory. He shows how the prevailing narrative of the day, that war was something evil which must be avoided at all costs, ultimately did nothing to prevent the arrival of the bloodiest conflict of the twentieth century, but also the clearest example of a moral war; a war waged by the defenders of Western culture against the wielders of totalitarian evil.
Both intellectual history and historical biography, Loconte treats not only Lewis and Tolkien and their works as directly influenced by the conflict of their age, but he also shows us the presuppositions and ideologies of the day, from Freudian psychoanalysis to the despair of T. S. Eliot, and the works of pessimistic anti-war writers such as Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway. Furthermore, he deals with the political machinations of those who desired to avoid war at all costs, such as Neville Chamberlain and Franklin D. Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor, as well as those who sensed the danger coming and spoke about it, Winston Churchill being foremost among them.
The War for Middle Earth should be a book that you read, reread, and read again. It should be a book whose thesis you think about every time you read one of Tolkien’s poems or Lewis’s literary critiques. It should be a book that you place on your bookshelf and show off to your friends. It is a treasure. It will remain such.
The author exposes the heart of the totalitarian state in all its manifestations. It is, he argues, the logical step on the ladder that leads to Nietzsche’s superman; it is, in its basest form, the will to power. The only answer, for Lewis and for Tolkien, and for us today, is the will to fight. We may wish, like Frodo, that we had been born in a different time, in a different place; we may wish that this responsibility had not been assigned to us. “So do all who live to see such times,” as Gandalf states, “but that is not for them to decide.” All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. The War for Middle Earth did not end at the Gates of Mordor, nor with the surrender of Germany; the war rages on, and we, as in the days of Tolkien and Lewis, are called to fight.
Review written by C. A. Gerber
February 28th, 2026
Faithful Reason is one of the greatest books I have read in the last couple of years. Andrew Walker does a superb job of working through the philosophical and theological implications of a massive topic. In precise, though at times technical, terms, Walker illuminates the necessity of engaging with and using natural law as a two-edged sword to both defend the Christian faith and challenge the prevailing atheistic narrative of legal positivism. Never shying away from his principled evangelical beliefs, Walker takes Thomism back from the Catholics and shows how we, evangelicals of the twenty-first century, not only can but must use natural law ethics for our good and God’s glory.
Walker does not stand alone; rather, he stands, as we all do, upon the shoulders of giants. He makes this very clear through his use of quotations and arguments from respected theologians and political scientists from all ages. From Cicero to Locke, Augustine to Calvin, Walker argues clearly and succinctly that to engage the modern arena, we must return to the first principles upon which all logical conversation, all moral frameworks, and all laws and regulations must, in essence, be based. The common grace given to all individuals, regardless of time, religion, or geographical location, gives evidence of the goodness of our Creator, “so that they are without excuse.” Everyone instinctively feels horror and hatred when contemplating an image of the Auschwitz concentration camp; yet when seeing a picture of Mother Teresa, a very different feeling surges through our veins. This is the knowledge of good and evil by which we will all one day be judged. We cannot say that we did not know, and Walker makes this as clear as daylight in this masterful presentation of natural law ethics from a distinctly Protestant perspective.
A must-read for all evangelicals seeking to engage in thoughtful, helpful conversation with our culture for the preservation of ordered liberty.
Review written by C. A. Gerber
February 27th, 2028
Our country is in danger, argues author Jarod Murphey, and the danger lies not in the traditional bogeyman we have become so used to seeing on the left.
Rather, the enemy lies to our right, in the increasingly antisemitic rhetoric of individuals christening themselves “conservatives” but who, as Christ warned us, are in reality wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Taking a deep dive into what is wrong with the conservative movement and how a group of neo-Nazi propagandists have hijacked it, Murphey digs up quotes, speeches, and claims made by these individuals and shows clearly and precisely the danger of these baseless accusations, which are, at their root, nothing short of a betrayal of Christian principles and the foundational principles of Judeo-Christian morality. Murphey supports his argument with extensive citations from speeches, podcasts, and social media posts, though at times the volume of quotations risks overwhelming the narrative flow.
For the first time, we have someone who is both a conservative in his own right and a dedicated Christian, as well as someone who sees the danger, diagnoses the problem, and proposes the solution without fear of attacking those “on our side.” The solution proposed by many who claim there are “no enemies to the right,” though perhaps noble-hearted, is insufficient, argues Murphey, for when you declare that to the right there is no wrong, the devil will make sure to whisper lies in your ear from the right.
This is a heavy book, a short read that feels much longer because of the heavy, nauseating material Murphey exposes. The Swastika in the Sanctuary remains, nonetheless, a necessary read for all of us who intend to engage our culture with a Christ-like response and stand firm even when faced with threats from both sides. We must follow the straight path and remain faithful in the face of withering fire, falling into the arms of neither enemy, but remaining, as always, with our eyes fixed on the eternal hope.
Review Written by C. A. Gerber
February 27th, 2026
The Hour of the Madman has arrived.
Carl Trueman once again delivers a stunning, accurate portrayal of the problems facing modern humanity. “We have killed God,” declared Nietzsche, yet we still want to be subject to His laws. No, he urges, we have unbound the earth from the sun, and we must face the consequences of our actions. If we have killed God, we must become gods ourselves. The limits, ends, and obligations given to us by this Higher Being are no longer applicable, but the only way to prove this is to desecrate Him. We must desecrate the holy, trample underfoot the limits, create our own ends, and leave unfulfilled all the obligations that have bound us to each other and to a higher purpose. Only then can we create our own sense of purpose, our own ends, limits, and obligations.
This is such an accurate portrayal of the modern age. Why is it that there has been such a viciously anti-Christian surge in recent years? Why has that which was held sacred for generations now become commonplace, even vulgar? Why does modern culture deny the basic facts of reality when they are in plain black-and-white letters, staring it in the face?
Yet when we do this, when we defy the sacred and desecrate God, Trueman argues, the end result is very simple: we desecrate ourselves as well. The limits we seek to triumph over are still limiting us. Death is an unavoidable conclusion, a fact of life; biological sex is binding, however much modern culture seeks to claim otherwise. And the cost of denying this is great. We become like the madman; we end up insane, just as Nietzsche did. We reach the bottom, the pit of nihilistic despair.
By desecrating the sacred, we have desecrated ourselves, and the only answer is once more to sanctify the God of our fathers. By doing so, we will find the answer to the question of the ages, the anthropological question: what is man?
The choice is simple. Trueman makes it clear that there is no third route, no alternative. Many have tried, but all have failed. We must either embrace the reality of the Creator of the universe, along with His teleology, or we must go the way of Nietzsche. If we deny the former, we necessarily choose the latter, and in doing so, the madman becomes the only man among us with any sanity.
Review Written by C. A. Gerber
February 27th, 2026