The Difference Between Good Walls and Bad Walz

The Horse and His Boy is my favorite Chronicle of Narnia. That’s almost certainly a minority position, but I have a soft spot for hidden gems—which may explain why Rogue One sits atop my Star Wars pantheon. It’s so good that it doesn’t even need lightsabers, just as The Horse and His Boy is so good that it doesn’t even need children from our world to capture the imagination. The reason I bring it up is because there’s a scene about halfway through that presents a rather foreign dilemma to we Americans. The story’s intrepid young quartet must enter and pass through the Calormen city of Tashbaan without being noticed and captured. This would be a fairly simple endeavor were it not for the fact that the entire city is surrounded by a wall. There is only one way in from the south, one way out to the north, and the city gates are locked at night. Something of the same difficulty is faced by Jean Valjean when he must gain entrance to Paris without being discovered by the relentless Inspector Javert. And even the rebels in Rogue One could only gain access to Scarif by circumventing its “walls”…

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No, American Support for Abortion is Not 80%

I like listening to Batya Ungar-Sargon—who shows up with some frequency on The Megyn Kelly Show and The Free Press. She is charming and energetic and generally full of astute analysis, but her takes on abortion and gay marriage are less commendable. Batya’s argument is essentially this: The country wants gay marriage. The country wants abortion. It’s time to move on. Perhaps I should expect such thinking from a self-described "MAGA leftist,” but it’s her framing of the issues that irks me the most. By attributing to both more cultural support than either actually enjoys, she infers for herself a dubious moral loophole. It’s the Pontius Pilate approach to avoiding culpability. I do not support this miscarriage of justice, but who am I to thwart the will of the people? Batya said something to Megyn Kelly back in November that prompted me to DM her the following:

I was dismayed this week when you equated support for gay marriage with opposition to transgender ideology. “The right side of those two issues…

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Telehealth Abortion: The Streaming Porn of “Family Planning”

Earlier this month, new #WeCount abortion estimates were published for the first half of 2025. With barely contained glee, they reported that more U.S. abortions were performed in January 2025 than in any single month since their tracking began (in April 2022). That led them to publish the following neener, neener headline: “Abortions in the US have increased since Dobbs.” I can almost hear their smug self-satisfaction. Who is the “they” behind the #WeCount numbers? That would be the perversely-named Society of Family Planning. I say that because “family planning“ organizations seem to all have the same plan. Namely, the elimination of family—through birth control and abortion. God says to be fruitful and multiply. The family planning business much prefers sterility. And though that may seem a foolish longterm strategy, I’ve noticed that the devil isn’t overly concerned with…

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Male and Female He Created Them (for Marriage or Celibacy)

My 22-year-old daughter has become a fan of Dancing with the Stars, which just wrapped its 34th season. It’s only been airing for 20 years but has found a way to cram multiple seasons into a single trip around the sun. Why hasn’t the NFL thought of that?! A few episodes in, my daughter invited me to join her. Since it’s not every day that she asks me to do something, I was happy to oblige. And so Tuesday nights were set aside for our weekly father/daughter watch party. The basic premise of DWTS is the pairing of professional dancers with B- or C-list celebrities who are eliminated couple-by-couple as the show progresses. Since the judges give out perfect scores like candy, viewers are allowed to vote too—which means that sometimes the worst dancers get voted through and the best dancers get voted out. There are complicated reasons for this phenomenon which my daughter has wearied of trying to explain.

The reason I bring any of this up is because I noticed something a few episodes into Dancing with the Stars that struck me as rather revealing. In addition to their outfits, that is. As you may imagine on a show populated…

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Remembering Sara Henley

Thanks to America This Week, I’ve been on a top-ten kick of late. Novels, movies, songs, TV shows… There’s something satisfying and exceedingly challenging in trying to narrow such broad fields down to your ten favorites. Not the ten best, mind you—that’s a thoroughly impossible task—but favorites is at least manageable. I’ve tried to rope in friends and family, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (which reminds me, I need to rank drinks next). My ten favorite novels are fairly conventional. Lots of classics. They are, in no particular order: The Three Musketeers, Tom Sawyer, Les Miserables, That Hideous Strength, The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, Pride & Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Rings, and East of Eden. There’s a good chance we share some in common, which is more than can be said of my songs list.

Coming up with my ten favorite songs, it turns out, was a far more difficult task. I’ve read hundreds of novels in my 50 years, but I’ve heard…

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Voddie Baucham’s Eleventh Commandment

Eric Metaxas sent out a video last week from 2021 titled “Biblical Justice vs. Social Justice.” It was from a panel discussion he’d participated in for Salem Media Group. The other two panelists were Charlie Kirk and Voddie Baucham. Charlie Kirk, as the whole world knows, was assassinated on September 10. Voddie Baucham died two weeks later of an unspecified medical emergency. Charlie was 31; Voddie was 56. So seeing the two of them sitting next to each other on stage was another pause-to-consider moment in a month full of pause-to-consider moments.

I got to see Voddie Baucham in person at the 2006 Desiring God National Conference. It was the same conference that introduced me to Tim Killer and Mark Driscoll. All three were standouts, but Voddie was the only one to talk about abortion—so I knew from the outset that he was made of sterner stuff. He pointed out…

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