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** Daily Newsletter: April 30, 2026
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** In today’s newsletter:
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ALEXANDER LARMAN: Charles and Trump’s Very Special Relationship ([link removed])

ROBERT BARRON: Recovering the University’s Soul ([link removed])

EDDIE LAROW: The Church’s Gender Gap Problem ([link removed])

SEAN SKEDZIELEWSKI: Microplastics in Our Souls ([link removed])
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** Charles and Trump’s Very Special Relationship ([link removed])
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** Alexander Larman
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King Charles and Trump have a surprisingly fond, if not uncritical, relationship. The state visit this week benefited the relationship between the two nations, writes royal family expert Alexander Larman.

“What Charles has done, ably and tactfully, is show Trump both friendship and international unity—while making it clear that he has reciprocal expectations of the White House.”
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** Recovering the University’s Soul ([link removed])
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** Robert Barron
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From the May issue: Bishop Robert Barron explained how the modern university system came to such a cynical view of knowledge and the human person, and what can be done to fix it. He writes, “The university did not begin as a credentialing apparatus or a hub for political activism. It emerged as the institutional expression of a remarkably generous vision of the human being.”

This essay was delivered as the 2026 Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida, and is available to view here ([link removed]) .
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** The Church’s Gender Gap Problem ([link removed])
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** Eddie LaRow
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“A recent Gallup poll shows that 42 percent of young men consider religion very important to their lives, compared to only 29 percent of young women in the same age group.” Eddie LaRow suspects that “the very thing pushing young women away from church is drawing young men toward it: community founded on countercultural moral strictures.”

For further reading: Much ink has been spilled over the right’s “woman problem.” For the female perspective on what might be drawing women to the right or religion before, allegedly, being driven away, read Freya India on “The Women Joining the New Right ([link removed]) .”
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** Microplastics in Our Souls ([link removed])
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** Sean Skedzielewski
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Charles Cornish-Dale, who until 2024 was only known as his X handle Raw Egg Nationalist, has found the root of all societal problems: plummeting testosterone levels. But this diagnosis, which he explains at length in his book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is inhibited by its “unabashed materialism,” writes Sean Skedzielewski. Virtue cannot be reduced to hormone levels.

“Cornish-Dale simply ignores the Christian insight that sainthood is possible even with a decrepit body in a deeply degraded environment.”

For further reading: The inaugural issue of First Things included an essay on “The Lives of the Saints and Pursuit of Virtue ([link removed]) ,” the implementation of which in one’s own life does not require a hormone panel.

Upcoming Newsletters
* May 4, 2026: The Fourth Watch by James F. Keating | Subscribe here ([link removed]) .

* May 6, 2026: The Jew From Nowhere by J. J. Kimche | Subscribe here ([link removed]) .

Until next time,


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VIRGINIA AABRAM
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Newsletter Editor
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