Weekly Digest: Upcoming Appearances

Blaming men, against meritocracy, and a roundup of press about my book

Welcome to my weekly digest for February 23, 2024, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.

I wanted to give you a head’s up of some of my upcoming appearances.

This weekend I’m in Arizona speaking at ASU and Providence OPC. Upcoming I’ll be having a book launch event in Washington, DC with American Moment on the 29th (sold out I believe). I will be speaking at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in both East Lansing, Michigan the weekend of March 8th and in Philadelphia the weekend of April 24th. I’m tentatively booked for an ISI student summit event in Dallas on the weekend of April 5th.

Some of what I’ve been reading: Get Married by Brad Wilcox (podcast with him coming soon) and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity by Leon Podles.

Life in the Negative World

If you bought my new book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture on Amazon, I’d very much appreciate you leaving a rating or review there. I’d really like to boost my number of Amazon ratings.

I was a guest on In the Market with Janet Parshall talking about my book, and also on Conversations That Matter.

My book was reviewed by the Worthy House, and got a mention from Jason Jewell (who is planning a review), American Affairs, Kerby Anderson, and Stephen McAlpine.

So far I’m getting great feedback.

A Word From Our Sponsor

Our sponsor this week is Union University, a great Baptist school I was pleased to be able to visit a couple of month’s ago. Please be sure to check them out.

Best of the Web

Ryan Burge: Men Have Abandoned Marriage and Parenthood - This is a good example of the “blue pill” view of the world. Burge sees the decline of marriage mostly resulting from male choice to abandon it. Certainly, that is a part of the answer. But many men are involuntarily frozen out of marriage because they aren’t desirable enough to women. Burge should read up on hypergamy.

Rob Henderson: Two-Parent Families Are More Important Than College - The normally excellent Henderson has this to say, “People say we shouldn’t shame single moms, that they are doing the best they can. I generally agree. I was, for a time, raised by a single mother. I am perfectly at ease, though, with saying we can shame absentee fathers.” Again, another person unwilling to hold women accountable for anything.

Relative to the above, absolutely men need to be held responsible for their bad choices and actions. There’s more than just a little bit to legitimately talk about there. At the same time, we should not engage in partiality. We have to be willing to tell the whole truth.

The London Review of Books has an in-depth look at a biography of Alex Comfort, who wrote the famous book The Joy of Sex.

Comfort started to write about sex in the late 1940s and soon began collating a card index on the subject. He saw it as closely connected to his anarchism. ‘Rulers,’ he believed, ‘have always had a hardly conscious conviction that sexual freedom was in some way related to political liberty’: they always wanted ‘to appear as the upholders of a morality increasingly based on fear’. Capitalism and the state created a ‘barbaric’ world that deformed people’s ability to have good sex. Comfort hoped that scientific study and enlightened education programmes would remove the forcefield of anxiety around sex, and formulated two rules to govern sexual behaviour: don’t risk producing unwanted children and don’t exploit other people’s feelings.

But Comfort would probably never have written The Joy of Sex had it not been for a development in his personal life. After more than fifteen years of marriage, he began an affair.

Nate Fischer: Meritocracy Must Not Be Our Goal - Nate argues, not against merit per se, but that ownership should be the primary organizing principle.

New Content and Media Mentions

This week I got a mention in the Federalist.

My podcast this week was with Josh Abbotoy talking about the “big sort” and what it means.

Paid subscribers can read the transcript.

You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

Also this week, Trump skeptic John Seel contributed a guest post on why Trump’s rhetoric appeals to evangelicals.