Progressives like to say that a racist doctrine they call “replacement theory” is very big on the right.

I won’t say there is no such theory.  There is.  Actually, though, versions of the theory are held both on the farthest, farthest fringes of the right and – more quietly – among large, large sections of the left.

I understand the rage that some people feel about the abolition of the federal abortion right.  It must be a lot like the rage that many of those in the South felt about the abolition of slavery.  Both events spelled the end of a way of life.  In the one case, it was a life of aristocratic leisure; in the other, a life of sex without consequences.

A dark age is not so much an age in which the level of technology degenerates as one in which the level of civilization degenerates.  We are walking into the newest dark age with eyes open.

An interviewer wanted to know what I have to say to people who "just aren't going to" believe in God.

That sounds more like a statement of intention than a statement of disbelief.  There isn't anybody who "just isn't going to" believe in God.  If someone as wretchedly far out in the cold and dark as I was could be drawn into faith, anyone can be.  But he has to consent.

Some years ago, before the word “woke” was so widely used, a student asked me in class “Are you woke?”  I had never heard the expression before.  Puzzled, I asked “Are you asking whether I’m awake?  I try to be.”  He said no, that wasn’t what he meant.  “Then are you asking whether I’m enlightened?”  No, it wasn’t that either.

I’ve just posted “The Key to Happiness,” Mark Bauerlein’s interview with me in March, 2022.  Mark Bauerlein is host of the First Thoughts podcast at First Things.

Recently, a colleague took issue with the suggestion that Abraham Lincoln believed in natural law.  My colleague’s reasoning was that it’s “hard to see how Lincoln’s pragmatic response to Dred Scott – ‘I oppose spread of slavery to the territories but will not urge abolition in the existing slave states’ -- is an example of natural law philosophy.”