Discovery Institute

We all tend to favor life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what happens when the pursuit ruins children’s happiness (and sometimes keeps them from life itself)? Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege (U. of Chicago, 2023) shows that the national Wars on Poverty and Drugs have been less effective than the War on Family that the cultural left has Read More ›

Two decades ago John Judis and Ruy Teixeira prophesied big changes in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority. Their new book asks, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (Henry Holt, 2023). Essentially, college-educated professionals (some with unorthodox lifestyles) have now pushed out “many of the people in the deindustrialized towns and small cities of middle America [and left them] stripped Read More ›

Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Crossway, 2023) has probably left dozens of historians groaning, Why didn’t I think of that? Wilson could have written one more bloviating account of how the WEIRD revolution — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic — affected the world during the past 250 years. Instead, he concentrated on the one Read More ›

The best biography I’ve read the past year is Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Robert E. Lee saw northern victory resulting from a brutal turning of soldiers into cannon fodder, and did not admit that slavery was wrong. But James Longstreet, Lee’s right hand after Stonewall Jackson died, joined the Republican Read More ›

Whenever we pivot in life, freedom from fear requires either a colossal ego or a colossal God. Ego leads us to grab what is not ours. The path to contentment starts with faith in God. In this sequel to Lament for a Father, Marvin Olasky first describes his journey from Judaism to atheism to Marxism to Christ and then his adventures in evangelical, conservative, Read More ›

Coram Deo Church of Bremerton, WA will host Discovery Institute Vice President John G. West as he presents on the role of Christianity in cultural reformation on Tuesday night, March 12. Guests are encouraged to register in advance, as space is limited. From the organizers: Is American culture in a death spiral? If so, what can the church do about Read More ›

Frederick Douglass after his escape from slavery wrote three terrific autobiographies, including My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), which since 2010 has been reprinted at least eight times by various publishers. Far less known is the escape from Georgia to Boston of enslaved Ellen and William Craft in 1848: She could pass for white and disguised herself as a wealthy Read More ›

In this newsletter I mostly review nonfiction, but on a wintry night many people want to snuggle up with a novel. Here are four suggestions, starting with Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For is In the Library (Alison Watts translation, Doubleday, 2023). It’s a charming tale from Japan of people searching for change and getting the nudge they need Read More ›

What can we learn from C.S. Lewis about the growing misuse of science to attack God and support authoritarianism? Join bestselling author and talk show host Eric Metaxas as he explores this topic and more with C.S. Lewis expert and Discovery Institute Vice President John West in Seattle on Feb. 8. This live event is part of Metaxas’s Socrates in the City series — conversations that Read More ›