History doesn’t repeat, Mark Twain said, but it sometimes rhymes. Sometimes the rhymes are so compelling that they cry out for comment. President Biden’s speech on August 31, 2021, on the end of the war in Afghanistan was, for me, one of those times. It recalled to me a speech given on June 4, 1940, […]
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Part I is here: http://bereansatthegate.com/churchill-on-collectivism-and-the-limits-of-politics-part-i/ Winston Churchill was an outspoken critic of Communism as well as the milder Socialism that was a political force in Britain. He understood the difficulties presented by human nature for these political doctrines in a non-academic, wonderfully common sense way: human nature being what it is, Communism and Socialism are […]
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Winston Churchill was an outspoken opponent of Russian Communism from the beginning, not only because he saw it as a threat to the British Empire, although that was true, but because he perceived that its principles were inimical to healthy human society. In 1920, for example, he wrote an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald […]
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Gold, Glory, and God: The Conquest of Mexico
06 Feb 2019
2019 marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés. Cortés displayed tremendous daring, resilience, and skill in the overthrow of a powerful civilization in such a short time with but a relative handful of men, but his legacy is ambiguous. He broke the […]
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The God of Tarzan
23 Jan 2019
“The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.” –Psalm 14:2 – While Tarzan of the Apes is perhaps not the first literary character one would associate with theological questions, one of the stories Edgar Rice Burroughs penned about the jungle hero deals […]
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Did Alexander the Great Visit Jerusalem?
09 Jan 2019
Despite the tremendous number of studies and biographies of Alexander the Great, his life is difficult to reconstruct historically. Of the sources we possess, not one was written in his lifetime. All of the reports we have of this remarkable man and his extraordinary achievements were penned three hundred years or more after the events […]
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In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand,” the title character undertakes a quest for the Unpardonable Sin; but the story does not simply follow the Scriptural definition of this sin: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31-32; Mark 3:28-29; Luke 12:10). Hawthorne’s Brand defines the Unpardonable Sin in terms of a separation of the intellect and the […]
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Churchill, History, and Heroism
30 Nov 2018
November 30, 2018: Today is Sir Winston S. Churchill’s 144th birthday, a day for remembering. Churchill has been gone for 53 years. Yet, because of a recent surge of film and television treatments, most notably Darkest Hour (2017), in which he was brilliantly portrayed by Gary Oldman—as well as kerfuffles on Twitter about the legitimacy […]
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The Redemption of Galadriel
08 Nov 2018
One of the most impressive elements of the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien is its depth. One walks upon the fields of Middle-earth with the awareness that you are treading ancient paths. Indications that this world was in existence long before you discovered it are everywhere: ruined watchtowers of fallen realms, tombs of bygone kings, snippets […]
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God’s Whispers in The Wind in the Willows
24 Oct 2018
“All great stories are about longing,” a friend recently said to me. I immediately thought of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, the classic book about the adventures of four animal friends: Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad. Grahame’s tale is beautifully wrought, not only in richness of language, but in calling forth what […]
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