By Jonathon Van Maren My introduction to this series on the 20th century, “The Century that Changed Everything,” can be found here. Part I, “The World Before the War,” can be found here. This is the third installment in the series. On February 4, 2012, the last living veteran of the Great War died at the age…
Some of you might be interested in an interview I did recently with the Reformed Rebel podcast, in which we discussed abortion and the responsibility of Christians.
By Jonathon Van Maren A couple of years ago, data on the scale of secularization in Europe over the last half-century were released, revealing that a mere 18% of those who identify as Christian regularly show up at services. Even those who still identify with a Christian denomination, it turned out, do so for largely cultural reasons,…
By Jonathon Van Maren It is a matter of time before every organization affiliated with a religious institution that still holds to the biblical sexual ethic will be condemned as homophobic and ostracized. Recall, for example, that Pete Buttigieg was accused of working with a hateful organization when a photo “surfaced” of the gay man…
By Jonathon Van Maren When the Spanish Flu pandemic struck in 1918, many churches responded by appointing special days of prayer, calling upon their congregants to beg God for assistance in the face of a spreading disease that was felling millions. In some instances, people called on national leaders to urge citizens to their knees…
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By Jonathon Van Maren My introduction to this series on the 20th century, “The Century that Changed Everything,” can be found here. This is the second installment in the series. In many ways, the 20th century begins in our collective memory on June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were shot…
By Jonathon Van Maren Christopher Hitchens would probably be pleased to know that nearly a decade after his death, people have not stopped talking about him. Beyond the endless speculation as to what the Hitch might have had to say about President Donald Trump (back in 2000 he wrote that Trump had “worked out how…
By Jonathon Van Maren Buzzfeed News recently published the fascinating (and still unfolding) story of Katie McHugh, a one-time conservative gadfly who wrote for the Daily Caller and other right-wing publications before becoming so embedded in the alt-right she managed to get canned from Breitbart in 2017. I found it particularly interesting because McHugh went…
By Jonathon Van Maren It has been twenty-two years since Dutch author Geert Mak’s An Island in Time was first published in the Netherlands. An ode to Jorwerd, the little Frisian village where he grew up, Mak writes movingly of the decline and collapse of village culture across Europe with lines rendered so tenderly I…