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At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

For all of their ultimately irreconcilable differences, there nevertheless exists among the world’s wisdom traditions a trans-cultural, trans-historical consensus regarding the primary importance of identifying the nature of ultimate reality. To put it another way, they all agree that, at the conceptual level, there is a basic distinction between reality and appearance, the world and…

Fear. Among the most universal and primal of all emotions, there is scarcely one among us who hasn’t felt its presence.  Perhaps this is why we seldom like to discuss it, at least when it comes to addressing our own fears. Subjectively speaking, there is nothing pleasant about the experience of fear.  Men especially are…

While I’ve been blissfully disengaged from the characteristic shrieking, whining, bitching, and moaning of our politics generally, and the Big Conservative media (the Big Con) specifically, it was hard to completely avoid the all too predictable bullshit, the hysteria, surrounding the Derrek Chauvin trial and its aftermath. Maxine Waters calls for the mob—the same mob…

If the last 60 or so years hasn’t been sufficient to do the trick, then the last year alone should have sufficed to convince Americans who tend to vote Republican that doing so is the ultimate exercise in futility. Republican politicians, along with their scribbling and babbling apologists in Big Conservative media (“the Big Con”),…

For all of my adult life, I had always regarded myself as a “conservative.”  No more. The reason for this is as simple as it was sobering for me to finally and fully realize: Conservatism, at least as it is embodied in the persons of so-called “conservative leaders,” meaning Republican politicians and media celebrities, is…

Fear. It’s universal, distributed among humans and animals alike. As such, and as much as we’d like to think otherwise, there are few emotional states, and quite possibly none, that underwrite our politics to the extent that does fear. The reason for this is simple enough: Politics in its barest, most fundamental sense is nothing…

In the contemporary United States (and the Western world generally), misconceptions concerning manliness abound.  These misconceptions derive from a variety of sources that I identified in a previous article.  There the focus was specifically upon the confusion that prevails over the nature of a violent engagement of the type that occurs in a true self-defense…

As I write this, it is Good Friday, the day that Christ, God-in-the-Flesh, died on the Cross. Christians the world over recognize this event as “the Atonement,” the means by which their Lord and Savior, fully God and fully Man, reconciled the Ground and Creator of the cosmos with the human beings who He made…

Warrior Flow Combatives stands alone among martial arts systems in multiple ways.  For present purposes, I focus upon its unabashed declaration of its raison d’etre.  As its founder, USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, informs his students: “I’m teaching you how to kill the bad guys.” Strictly speaking, Warrior Flow is not designed to train people how…

A friend of mine, who is not any kind of martial artist, recently expressed during the course of one of our many conversations a point of view that is all too common.  It is treated as axiomatic by most people and even among the vast majority of martial artists and sports contestants. The viewpoint is…
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