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

Housekeeping

Bob_Vila.png

Some of our more faithful readers may have noticed a long overdue recent update here at the What’s Wrong with the World website – we’ve updated our homepage look and the blogroll. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the image in the upper right-hand corner has been changed to a picture of the famous Donatello Crucifix along with the quote from Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse”. We felt that if this merry band of bloggers was going to be marching to do battle with the twin evils of jihad/liberalism (see below) then we’d like to do it under the banner of Christ crucified to help remind the world that “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” [1 Corinthians 1:18].

We hope you’ll check out the (many) new and improved links, as well as visit some old friends we decided to keep. Our basic thought process in updating the blogroll was this: which of the old links (websites and bloggers) were actually relevant to our current concerns or spoke to our mission in some way? Likewise, which websites and/or bloggers could we introduce readers to that did do a good job of writing about issues of the day or the twin evils of jihad/liberalism?

We think these twenty plus links are a good place to start, and while they are by no means exhaustive of the riches of the conservative/traditional internet, they reflect some of our regular stops for information and quality thinking. For example, all you have to do is search our archives to find Paul Cella’s appreciation for the 10th anniversary issue of America’s premier conservative journal of ideas, The Claremont Review of Books (a link we added). Or perform a different search of the archives and you’ll discover that one of our former contributors, Francis Beckwith, wrote a quick appreciation for Houston Baptist University’s wonderful journal The City (another link we added) for which he remains an advisory editor.

And we didn’t just add conservative thought journals – yet another search of our archives finds Lydia praising the work of Wesley Smith (who at the time was blogging for First Things, although now he’s moved over to “National Review Online.”) Wesley is one of those valuable resources that we think all our readers should be checking on regularly – so we added him to our blogroll.

As for who we took off – that was really more a matter of changing emphases and tastes around here, more than anything else. For example, to take just one example, while we all had nothing against the erudite cultured writings of Andrew Cusack (who was on the old blogroll), we all thought he didn’t quite fit the mission of What’s Wrong as well as some of the older and/or new links. The one old link that caused a bit of anguish, at least for me, was the website I like to call The American Conservative Liberal. Yes, they famously give voice to a foreign policy of restraint and prudence, and host some important and interesting voices on the right including Micah Mattix (one of their newer bloggers who is an excellent cultural critic that can be found at many of our other links), and their most popular writer, Rod Dreher. But (you knew there was a “but” coming), while I tend to agree with my colleague Paul that we need to expand the Right’s tent, I simply refuse to make room in the tent for a fool (and liar) who is going to support the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement and no one else at the magazine speaks up to defend Israel and/or call him out for that ridiculous post (and there are plenty others from McConnell – Israel is a hobbyhorse for him). Should Israel be a litmus test for us on the Right? That depends upon what one means. The matter of the Jihad, among many others, ought to influence our thinking concerning Israel. By any measure, McConnell is far to the left on this issue, buying uncritically into virulent left-wing (and Islamic) propaganda. He has the freedom to do that if he likes, but it should rule out any serious conservative’s support for the magazine until he is sent packing.

Of course, in addition to McConnell, there are other problems with The American Conservative Liberal: their various lukewarm defenses of real marriage published alongside celebrations of so-called “gay marriage” (to be fair, we’ve seen "National Review Online" publish the occasional silly celebration of faux marriage as a 'conservative' choice and we won’t honor their general website with a link for that reason among others); their apoplectic reaction to the Tea Party, their praise of the unfortunate warmed-over liberalism of Marilynne Robinson (which I’ve already blogged about). I could go on – this is just a sample of the past couple of months. In short, they are not a magazine worthy of sustained support from traditional, religious American conservatives who would like to roll back the liberal project in this country and are looking for serious intellectual arguments to aide them in their efforts. Look elsewhere – and start with any of our other links which we know you will enjoy.

Comments (1)

Jeff, thank you, this is a vast improvement. Lot of good work here.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.