William Murchison

  You think you know. In fact, much of the time, you don’t, nor can you. Life in the 21st century is harder to unscramble than an omelet. The U.S. Supreme Court stretches out its arm to undo a predecessor Court’s imposition, half a century ago, of a national policy of... Read More →

  It’s not civically edifying or anything else when some jerk throws a Molotov cocktail at a “reproductive health facility”—leave aside the verbal evasion meant to conceal the identity of an abortion clinic. It is no more edifying when another apostle of free speech,... Read More →

  And so it goes: the gaze of society deflected, as usual, by the modern establishment’s failure—or refusal—to acknowledge what should be called and reckoned with as religious truth. As the Human Life Review’s Jim McFadden used to sigh, verbally, in signing off from yet... Read More →

  “Abortion-Rights Measures Prevail, Indicating a Post-Roe Backlash” —The Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2022 Well, yes. That would be about the size of it, as I reckon up events. The Dobbs decision, whereby the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew the tyranny and moral sterility... Read More →

NATION FACES CHANGED ABORTION LANDSCAPE —Headline, the New York Times, June 26, 2022   Sure enough? The Times, the Times!—America’s narrow-eyed bearer of meat-slab tidings and truths wouldn’t tickle us under the chin with a feather, would it, hoping to provoke a giggl... Read More →

  Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementant. Whom God would destroy He first makes mad. And how! So much I gather from Prof. Carl R. Trueman’s new and justly celebrated study The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Upon turning the last page, the reader (as I testify from... Read More →

  After a life spent in daily journalism, I am coming to believe that you have to watch the little stuff in daily life in order to acquire some intellectual hold on the big stuff. Add up a lot of little stuff, after appropriate sorting, and you may arrive at a depiction, or... Read More →

  . . . But say there hadn’t been a media leak from the vicinity of the U.S. Supreme Court, and say we didn’t know, or couldn’t intuit, how the Court means to rule this summer on Roe v. Wade’s constitutional sanctity, or lack of it. That would have meant . . . what, exactly,... Read More →

  Oddly—or maybe it’s not odd after all, given the power of habit—Americans have come to consider the United States Supreme Court as, well, supreme: garlanded, perfumed, raised in immensity over imperfect surroundings. Or—as Ol’ Blue Eyes put it in a lus... Read More →

  So how’d we get here anyway?—this place, this time we live in, with its vacant predicate for the moral responsibilities of human life? A question at least as tangled follows hard on the first one: Given that we’re where we are, what do we do? I invite suggestions. Erika... Read More →