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…
By Jonathon Van Maren December 18, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The responses to my column last week detailing the horrific story of a boy who engaged in porn-inspired sexual molestation of his young nieces after accessing porn on his iPhone have indicated once again that many parents simply do not want to recognize the dangers that smartphones pose to…
By Jonathon Van Maren This column was first published at LifeSiteNews in 2016. When the film Obvious Child was released in 2014, pro-choice groups triumphantly announced the arrival of the “abortion comedy.” It was a hilarious movie, they announced, and it was about abortion—thus marking the crossing of the final frontier in the abortion wars. Abortion was…
By Jonathon Van Maren In spite of hopes that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a post-racial era, it now seems obvious that issues of racism and polarization are even worse now than they were before the soaring rhetoric of Obama’s triumphant 2008 victory speech. With the increasingly visible violence between members of…
By Jonathon Van Maren This column was first published in 2016. It’s a common complaint in pro-life circles: Why is it often so hard to get the churches involved in social causes? We know that Christians have abortions, too—so it is impacting us personally. We know that Christians are, for the most part, very anti-abortion—so…
By Jonathon Van Maren “Are you guys religious?” It’s a question every pro-life activist doing educational outreach has heard. The question is always leveled suspiciously, as if the truth of our abortion victim photography is contingent on whether or not pro-life activists believe in God. The response to this question is simple: Abortion is wrong…
By Jonathon Van Maren “Pornography is the theory,” renowned feminist Robin Morgan once wrote, “rape is the practice.” Indeed, feminists used to widely understand that pornography was, at its very best, dehumanizing and degrading, a product by men and for men that portrayed women only as objects of male desire. At its very worst, it…
By Jonathon Van Maren I was very pleased to see that GQ Magazine has joined the growing number of secular publications that are beginning the painful process of examining our out-of-control cultural obsession with pornography, recently publishing an article entitled 10 Reasons You Should Quit Watching Porn. While a number of prominent feminists (including Naomi Wolf) have openly…
By Jonathon Van Maren This column was first published in 2014 She looks young, younger than her 18 years. Sitting on a bed in a hotel room wearing baggy pajamas, glasses, and a far-away look, she looks at the camera and says bluntly, “A lot of s**t in my life has been ruined because of…
By Jonathon Van Maren Christmastime has something that enlarges the heart of everyone–even, I suspect, the grinchiest of atheists. Whether it is lightly falling snow, or visiting family and friends, or Christmas caroling, or an audience surging to its feet at the crescendos of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, there is something about this time of year…