Westminster abbey has been crowning and burying England’s monarchs for 11 centuries. But it rarely pays spiritual homage to anyone else apart from occasional statesmen, warriors, or poets of great eminence. So it was an unusual honor when the abbey…

This time last year, shares in Archbishop Rowan Williams on the imaginary stock exchange of spiritual leadership were plunging with the same trajectory later experienced by Lehman Brothers in the real stock exchange. According to ecclesiastical bears in the summer…

Quirky philanthropy and reform theology seem unlikely bedfellows, but between them they have created one of the newest and most interesting schools of divinity in the United States. Welcome to Beeson, an increasingly admired evangelical but ecumenical seminary on the…

America’s National Prayer Breakfast has a problem. It is in danger of becoming an empty social ritual rather than a meaningful spiritual event. As a reasonably regular attendee at the NPB for several years, your High Spirits columnist is sad…

Richard Nixon is having yet another comeback. As his biographer I always thought he would find a way of running again for some extra-terrestrial office. Instead his latest resurrection has been caused by Hollywood, or to be precise by Frank…

Syria is a difficult country politically, even for an Obama administration committed to dropping the axis of evil and replacing it with unconditional dialogue. But here is an idea for an initiative that might help to thaw the present frosty…

DONOR FATIGUE, NOT TO SAY COLLAPSE, is fast becoming a major problem for many nonprofit organizations. Due to the crisis on Wall Street and the recession on Main Street, giving to good causes is in precipitous decline. As the year…

What spiritual lessons should be learned from the world’s white-knuckle ride into, but not yet out of, financial meltdown? As the roller coaster has not halted on anything close to terra firma, it is premature to join in the chorus…

The new atheism, an intellectual cult ardently promoted by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, is increasingly fashionable in today’s secular Europe. By contrast, old-fashioned Christian apologetics are on the back foot. A reversal of this trend in…

This article appears in the July-August 2008 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here. IT’S A LONG WAY from Geneva, Switzerland, to Orlando, Florida — but not if you are pioneers in classical…