Katherine Spira, a Jewish woman from Sydney, Australia, shares her experience of Sunday’s terrorist attack. Though she was not at the beach where fifteen people were killed, the event confirms her sense that anti-Semitism “has eroded my sense of safety, freedom, and opportunity” in the place she has called home for her entire life. 

For further reading: In the wake of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburg that killed eleven, editor Rusty Reno wrote, “I fear that future conditions will be only more favorable to violence.” He continues, “In my view, we can best fight anti-Semitism by emphasizing the deepest truths we share in common, not the least of which is the commandment to love the Lord, our God, with all our hearts, souls, and minds (Deuteronomy 6:5).”

“Modern man has become a nomad, constantly moving from place to place, relationship to relationship, identity to identity,” writes Eddie LaRow. The epidemics of rootlessness and loneliness have hit Millennials and Gen Z especially hard, but they are not new phenomenons: Hitler spent his youth adrift in Vienna, himself a victim of liquid modernity. And, “like Hitler in Vienna, lost people will grasp at anything that offers them a tribe.”

For further reading: This piece continues the same themes as LaRow’s hugely popular “Gen Z Longs for Home” from October.

From the January issue: British archeologist and historian Alice Roberts’ new book Domination seeks to explain the rise of Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire as motivated purely by capital and power, “a tunnel vision that ­evinces no awareness at all of spiritual motives,” Philip Jenkins writes in his review. Though her books on ancient burials (her archeological speciality) are informative, her “mix of raw anger and chilly contempt” for organized Christianity undermines her scholarship and encourages one to “write off Domination as a horrible mistake.”

For further reading: On the topic of deliberate misunderstanding of the early church, Robin Darling Young’s “Gay Marriage: Reimagining Church History” (November 1994) dissects a book that claims the church blessed same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe.

The German Bishop’s Conference recently released an instruction to Catholic schools that they “should foster a classroom climate in which children and young people feel seen and taken seriously as they explore their sexual orientation and gender identity.” George Weigel writes that “this abandonment of theological sanity” cannot “go unaddressed by Rome indefinitely.”

For further reading: The Church in Germany has been leading the charge to liberalize theology for many decades. Raymond Cardinal Burke, in an interview with Sohrab Ahmari, called it an “Attack on Christ’s Lordship” (2019).

Upcoming Events

• February 1, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida: “Recovering the University's Soul’ ft. Bishop Robert Barron | Sarasota, FL. Register here.

• March 5, 2016: Annual D.C. Lecture: ”Our Crisis is Metaphysical” ft. Mary Harrington | Washington, D.C. Details coming soon.

Until next time,

VIRGINIA AABRAM

Newsletter Editor