What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Contributors

Editor Paul J Cella

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Editor Paul J. Cella is grateful he may freely wage intellectual warfare against the dominant spirit of his age. He is honored and awed that there is still such good in his country that this warfare is necessary and may perhaps be just. And in the company of such men and women as these he wonders whether he can measure up. He is an Editor at Redstate.com. His writing has appeared in The New Atlantis, The American Conservative, Touchstone, The Dallas Morning News and other publications. He is decisively outnumbered by girls in his domestic life. He loves golf but is quite bad at it. A Colorado-born Georgian, he attended Wake Forest University, mainly to watch ACC basketball.

Jeff Martin (Maximos)

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Jeff Martin (Maximos) insouciantly repudiates the immoral swindle of consent, according to which he owes some measure of loyalty to the liberal political and social regime under which he has lived, offering him, as it has, the shelter of its laws. He finds that this swindle is an obstacle to his self-actualization as a reactionary, and the actualization of the self is what the liberal bargain claims to be about, is it not?

He accounts himself unworthy of the company in which he finds himself, and the of domestic felicities which he enjoys with his wife and two young sons. He is a lifelong resident of the greater Philadelphia area, and a fan of the local sports franchises, which may account for his affinity for lost and futile causes. He attended Cedarville College (now a University!), from which he earned a BA in philosophy, and would even have graduated summa cum laude had his alma mater believed in the Latin language.

He believes that, however good things may be today, they were surely better yesterday, and takes solace in the fact that, however bad things may seem for the traditionalist at present, they could always be worse. Nevertheless, mindful of the fact that no cause is ever truly lost because none is ever truly won, he holds forth the hope that, as the passional aspect of human nature must be held in subjection by the rational, so also may the liberal tendency one day be governed to its proper measure by the traditional, the historical principle of reason.

Lydia McGrew

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Lydia McGrew is a widely published analytic philosopher, home schooling mother, blogger, and the wife of philosopher and apologist Timothy McGrew. She received her PhD in English from Vanderbilt University in 1995. She has published, and continues to publish, extensively in the theory of knowledge. She specializes in pure formal epistemology and in the application of formal epistemology to the evaluation of testimony and to various topics in the philosophy of religion. Her articles in philosophy have appeared in such journals as Ergo, Philosophical Studies, the Journal of Philosophical Research, and Erkenntnis. She and Timothy McGrew co-wrote the article on the resurrection of Jesus for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, and she wrote the article “Historical Inquiry” for the Routledge Companion to Theism.

In 2017 she published Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts, which defends the reliability of the New Testament using a long-neglected argument from incidental details.

Steve Burton

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Steve Burton received his B.A. in Philosophy from Berkeley in 1987 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Michigan in 1992. He specialized in aesthetics - especially the aesthetics of music. He taught for a year at the University of Indiana, and for three years at the University of Chicago, and, later, for a couple of years, interned in the Bio-ethics Department at the National Institutes of Health.

But he never learned to keep his conservative/libertarian trap shut.

He now lives near Kansas City, Missouri, where he does his best to look after his aged mother.

Bill Luse

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Bill Luse has written articles for Touchstone, The New Pantagruel (now defunct but still online) and Orson Scott Card's Ornery.org, and is the author of a novel he hasn't tried to publish in twenty years, but which is available in paperback book form upon request, as long as the request is accompanied by cash money. To actually survive, he teaches English at Valencia Community College in Orlando, and hosts the website Apologia (although the latter is not really pulling its weight in the matter of survival). He likes playing golf with Paul Cella when the opportunity arises, because it's easy money.

Daniel Larison

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Daniel Larison is a doctoral candidate in Byzantine history at the University of Chicago. Currently living in Hyde Park, he hails from Albuquerque. When he is not allegedly writing his dissertation on the sixth ecumenical council, he blogs at Eunomia on politics and foreign policy, translates Armenian poetry and serves as a reader at his local Russian Orthodox parish.

Zippy Catholic

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Zippy Catholic is a pseudonymous blogger. His qualification for commenting on momentous subjects is that he is some guy. He has a bachelor's in engineering, an MBA, and five software patents. He takes graduate courses for fun (usually in science and technology, most recently in bioinformatics) and might at some point ask some institution to recognize the fact with another wall hanging. His addiction to books is cause for concern among his relatives, who don't think that that much shelf and box space should be dedicated to books you haven't gotten around to reading yet.

He has worked in the cubicle farms of very large corporations, has personally started and run two small high tech companies, and has invested/participated in several more. He was briefly on the board of directors of a public NASDAQ-traded company and is a partner in a number of investment partnerships. In spite of all this he has just the barest clue how venture capital and Wall Street work, and is useless (dangerous even) as a source of advice on personal investment. He is an instrument rated private pilot.

Francis Beckwith

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Francis Beckwith is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. A graduate of Fordham University (Ph.D., philosophy) and the Washington University School of Law, St. Louis (Master of Juridical Studies), he is the author or editor of over a dozen books including Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007), To Everyone An Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (InterVarsity Press, 2004), Law, Darwinism & Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and Do the Right Thing: Readings in Applied Ethics & Social Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Wadsworth, 2002).

His articles have appeared in a wide range of a academic journals including Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, International Philosophical Quarterly, Public Affairs Quarterly, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Medicine & Philosophy, Social Theory & Practice, Catholic Social Science Review, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, San Diego Law Review, Journal of Law & Religion, Christian Bioethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, and Philosophia Christi. He presently sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Church & State and Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

He and his wife, the redoubtable Frankie Rozelle, live in Woodway, Texas, and are parishoners at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Bellmead, Texas.

Edward Feser

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Edward Feser teaches philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. He has been a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.A. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, and a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from the California State University at Fullerton.

Called by National Review "one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy," Feser is the author of On Nozick, Philosophy of Mind, Locke, and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hayek. He is also the author of many academic articles. His primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion.

Feser also writes on politics and culture, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective. In this connection, his work has appeared in such publications as The American Conservative, City Journal, Crisis, National Review, New Oxford Review, Reason, and TCS Daily.

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children.

Michael Liccione

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Michael Liccione earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and his BA in philosophy and religion from Columbia University. After a brief brush with running for political office, he taught in a number of institutions, mostly Catholic, including the Catholic University of America, the University of St. Thomas (Houston), Guilford Technical Community College, and a seminary that had declined to admit him as a student. His conventional publications have appeared in The Thomist, First Things, National Review, and Christifideles; his personal blog is Sacramentum Vitae. Still unsure of his place in what's left of the conservative movement, he looks forward to teaching again in a reasonably tolerant Catholic institution that is, all the same, an actually Catholic institution. Currently living in Central New York, he hopes either to return soon to his home town of New York City or to Washington, DC, to feed the fires of consternation.

Jeff Culbreath

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Jeff Culbreath is a married father of five, a bumbling rural homesteader, and a Catholic who attends the traditional Latin Mass. A fourth-generation Californian, he is fortunate to make his home amidst the scenic pastures and orchards of the northern Sacramento Valley. He lives vicariously through his musical children, known locally as “Prairie Strings”, who perform European classical and American traditional styles of music with nine instruments between them. Mr. Culbreath is less concerned with the politics and personalities of the day than he is with religion, culture and the “permanent things”. His views are strongly influenced by the ideas of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, John Senior, Wendell Berry, Neil Postman, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and many others, but above all by the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

Tony M.

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Tony M. received a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Thomas Aquinas College, and his M.A. in Math at Binghamton University, being given the latter degree mostly because it was the easiest way for the institution to get rid of him. While doing a day job in the nation’s capital that uses actuarial science, his preference would be to write endlessly on how wrong many modern theories and ideas are. Since he knows he is unqualified to do so, especially in company of people who actually know what they are talking about for a change, he has left publishing to others. Or, that might just be an excuse for laziness. He has, sporadically, taught math courses at local colleges at night as an adjunct, and has immense respect for those who keep at such a thankless task as teaching our nation’s ignorant barbarians. He is also a Catholic homeschooling father of a half-dozen or so, and wishes that he could manage to steer a home that did not quite so readily serve as an object lesson to prove that order does not come from chaos on its own.

Jeffrey S

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Jeffrey S. is a married father of two girls who is a lifelong resident of the Chicagoland area. He got his B.A. degree in Economics at the University of Michigan (and studied abroad for a year at the London School of Economics, where he lived in a row house in the East End and still misses fish and chips!) and his Masters degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. He currently lives in Chicago where his girls attend public school and he attends one of the most beautiful Catholic churches in the country. Jeff is a revert to the Catholic faith but says a prayer of thanks whenever he remembers his Protestant brothers and sisters who helped lead him back to Christ. As a result he has a strong interest in Christian apologetics, as well as Christian art, literature and music. He also loves the classics of Western civilization as well as more modern political and policy writing and does a lot of reading in his free time. He recently read a blogger who described himself as an “urban progressive”—Jeff considers himself the exact opposite—a reactionary lover of cities who hopes someday to be considered the Christian Theodore Dalrymple of the blogosphere.

Sage McLaughlin

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Sage McLaughlin is a Southern-born Irish-Ashkenazi Catholic with no accent. He is also a chastened one-time libertarian whose whole outlook on the right ordering of social life might be said to begin with G.K. Chesteron’s observation that, “Man’s most pragmatic need is to be something more than a pragmatist.” His concern for the fate of Christendom imposes on him the duty to proclaim the truth amidst this present endarkenment, as well as to recall the things of beauty and wisdom which are the inheritance of every Man of the West.

Mr. McLaughlin’s professional calling as a teacher is, as yet, unrealized. He is a wanderer whose stops over the last decade and a half have included Indianapolis, Denver, Charlotte, Washington, DC, and Columbia, SC. His vocation as a husband and father has slowed his wandering and inspired a more devoted interest in productive hobbies such as cooking and wine collecting (as opposed to the unproductive kind, which has in the past included Uzbek and Azeri language, and the authoring of unpublished works of fiction). His other interests include geography, competitive card games, and Irish folk music.

Mr. McLaughlin is cantankerous, argumentative, and lazy. He holds a B.A. with High Distinction in History from Indiana University, an M.S. in Defense and Strategic Studies from Missouri State University, and an M.S. in Geographic and Cartographic Science from George Mason University.

J.D. Freewods

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Jake Freivald lives in New Jersey with his wife and most of his ten children. To answer the usual questions: not a “blended family,” just him and his wife; no multiples, just consistent (about every two years); yes, Catholic, go figure; yes, they do know what causes that, and it suits them just fine, thank you very much.

He joined the ROTC program at Cornell, got a BS in electrical engineering, and served four years on active duty as an officer in the Marine Corps. He subsequently went into “enterprise software”, i.e., the stuff that big companies run, not something that you‘d buy for your laptop. He is currently a marketing executive for a New York City software company. Along the way, he founded the web magazine Flash Fiction Online to publish very short stories; although he recently turned that over to others, he remains interested in writing and writers.

His interests either don‘t get enough attention or get too much, considering they can really only come to the fore when he‘s neglecting his wife, his children, or his job. They are primarily music, art, philosophy, science, and politics. He‘s an expert in none of them.

John Fraser

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John R. Fraser is a husband and father of three children. Originally from Canada, he is a naturalized (legal) U.S. citizen who has also spent 8 years (and counting) as a missionary in Hungary. He has two master�s degrees in theology and has served as an adjunct faculty member of a small seminary in Hungary. He is currently working very slowly towards a doctorate.

He enjoys watching (and sometimes even playing) sports, occasional blogging, and aerial drone photography.