A roundup of important news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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Progressive scholar Kristin Kobes du Mez, author of the 2020 bestseller Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (which I reviewed here), recently stated that evangelicals should start revisiting the question of “ensoulment”—that is, when a human being receives a soul. Du Mez has been abandoning a number of key biblical positions since the publican of Jesus and John Wayne; she has come out as “affirmative” on the LGBT agenda, and throughout the book she treated the pro-life movement only with contempt and the assumption of hypocrisy.
Thus, it is worth asking why she wants to revisit this subject right now, when the abortion wars are raging across America with particular fierceness. Based on her trajectory, I suspect we may soon see du Mez come out with claims that the Bible actually supports abortion in some circumstances. Some progressive “Christians” justify abortion based on the argument that a human being at the earliest stages does not have a soul, and it is highly unlikely that du Mez does not know this. I hope I’m wrong. Scripture, as well as the Reformed tradition, are eminently clear on this subject. This article is a helpful primer: “The incarnation demands a pro-life position.”
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The ongoing global collapse of the birthrate continues, with mainstream media coverage on the social and political effects of this alarming trend being published alongside articles in the Los Angeles Times with headlines like this one: “It’s almost shameful to want to have children.” Meanwhile, Fortunereports that the sale of dog strollers has outstripped the sale of baby strollers in South Korea, and Newsweeknotes that North Korea is resorting to dire threats to boost the birthrate in the Hermit Kingdom. Countries around the world are desperate for babies, while the progressive ruling class insists that babies are a threat to our very future.
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Patrick Miller has a fascinating thought experiment on what would happen if 9/11 happened in 2024 instead of 2001. I was in the same grade as Miller on 9/11—Grade 8—and many of my memories were similar. But I think he’s right—institutional trust is so broken, and both Right and Left are now in thrall to conspiratorial internet grifters like Candace Owens, that unity would be virtually impossible: “If the Twin Towers Fell After Twitter.”
For those of you who saw the weird interview between amateur historian Darryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson on World War II, in which Cooper claimed that Winston Churchill is a “psychopath” and the “great villain” of the war, several conservative historians have written comprehensive correctives:
