By Jonathon Van Maren With millions of others, I watched the sickening livestream yesterday of Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze in the centre of Paris. Just before it collapsed, the iconic spire was transformed into a flaming finger thrust upwards, belching smoke, and for a horrible moment it looked eerily like Tolkien’s Dark Tower of Barad-dûr.…
By Jonathon Van Maren I’m not quite as optimistic as many people seem to be about the midterm elections today, although I may be as wrong as I was about Donald Trump’s ability to get elected president. The nonstop and frenzied political carousel that America seems to be trapped on is sometimes exhausting to the…
By Jonathon Van Maren After a nine-hour drive north from Calgary through an Albertan landscape dotted with reed-filled ponds and muskeg and miles of bright yellow canola fields, my cousin and I turned down a jaw-rattling gravel road featuring a large, tan sign framed with stripped and varnished tree branches that let us know that…
By Jonathon Van Maren July 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Perhaps nothing has revealed the stark American divide like the question that sprang from the lips of commentators from the moment the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy was announced: Will there be violence?There is in this question a recognition that two great masses of American people have moved…
By Jonathon Van Maren On Saturday night, I had the privilege of attending the Easter concert “He is Risen,” put on by the Mattaniah Men’s Choir and the Hosanna Choir (which my wife sings in), both of which are directed by Herman den Hollander. I’m very grateful for the enormous amount of work he and…
By Jonathon Van Maren If someone had told me last year that Canadian editorial boards and media outlets right across the political spectrum and the country would be expressing nearly universal outrage at Justin Trudeau’s decision to insert an “abortion attestation” into the Canada Summer Jobs application, I wouldn’t have believed it. I don’t think…
By Jonathon Van Maren It is a popular pastime of Democrats to point triumphantly to the moral shortcomings of assorted Republicans (Roy Moore being only the most recent and egregious of examples) and scoffing at the idea that the Republican Party is “pro-family values.” Some journalists have even pointed to polling that seems to indicate…
By Jonathon Van Maren After reading and reviewing traditionalist writer Rod Dreher’s much-discussed manifesto The Benedict Option this year (and his memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming earlier), I decided that I should probably read a few more such books—books that didn’t simply make the case for one political philosophy over another, but focused…
By Jonathon Van Maren In the wake of Trump’s excellent speech in Warsaw earlier this week, the Left promptly lost its mind. As I noted in my column on the speech, Trump eloquently outlined the threats posed to Western Civilization, explained the necessity of the Judeo-Christian values undergirding it, and held up the long struggle…
By Jonathon Van Maren In his review of my book The Culture War, which traces our culture’s descent from the Greatest Generation to the Millennial Snowflake Blizzard, lawyer Andre Schutten noted that he hoped I’d turn my last chapter on the way forward into an entirely separate book that looked more closely at how Christians…