James Diddams

5 days ago | lawliberty.org | Tom Cotton |Gage Klipper |Tal Fortgang |James Diddams

In March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA). For the first time, the ATA identified the People’s Republic of China as the most capable threat actor that now confronts the United States. The reasons for ranking China as the top threat—militarily, economically, diplomatically, and informationally—are made clear in Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, a crisply written new book by US Senator Tom Cotton.

1 week ago | lawliberty.org | Quentin Skinner |Max Skjönsberg |Gage Klipper |James Diddams

Quentin Skinner is surely the most prominent living historian of political thought. In a career spanning over sixty years, Skinner has written about the history of political thought from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. His oeuvre includes landmark studies on Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and ideas of the state and liberty, as well as pathbreaking works on historical methodology and hermeneutics.

1 week ago | lawliberty.org | Quentin Skinner |Aaron Coleman |Gage Klipper |James Diddams

In Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Idea, renowned historian Quentin Skinner traces how a republican vision of liberty, one all but forgotten today, was eclipsed by its modern, liberal counterpart. This is not his first foray into the idea of liberty. In 1998, he published Liberty before Liberalism; in 2008, he followed with Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Both books confined their examination of liberty’s meaning to mid-seventeenth-century England.

1 month ago | juicyecumenism.com | Mark Tooley |Methodist Voices |James Diddams

There are currently five major streams of Protestant political outlook and activism. The first, in terms of age, is the old Religious Left. It’s comprised chiefly of clergy from what’s left of Mainline Protestantism. It has little political influence but sometimes gets attention because it can stage rallies with berobed clergy in clerical collars. And it still has historic institutional affiliations.

1 month ago | juicyecumenism.com | Methodist Voices |Riley Case |Mark Tooley |James Diddams

In cleaning out some of my files recently I came across a very fat folder labeled “CUIC.” Churches Uniting in Christ is an ecumenical effort to merge, covenant, or express unity between denominations. Not much from the past 20 years was in the folder but there was plenty before that. It was intriguing enough that I believe reflection on ecumenism is worth a series of articles. We are, after all, in a time in which institutions (including church denominations) are rapidly changing.