John Shelton

2 weeks ago | wng.org | John Shelton

“Don’t wait to start having kids” was the best advice I ever received as a newlywed. While conventional wisdom says to put off parenthood for a couple years to focus on your marriage or your household finances, the truth is that you will never be fully ready and there are serious costs to waiting. First, and most practically, you never know if you will even be able to have kids. One in six couples struggle with infertility, a risk that only increases with age.

1 month ago | mereorthodoxy.com | John Shelton

This article was published in the Winter 2025 edition of our print Journal. To read for free online, please Subscribe. If you would like to receive future editions of the print Journal, become a Basic or Solidarity Member today. The course of American Christianity over the next thirty years—if not the rest of the twenty-first century—will be entirely downstream of James Davison Hunter.

2 months ago | thegospelcoalition.org | John Shelton

When modern Americans talk about freedom, we tend to mean freedom from constraint. Our Supreme Court provided one of the clearest statements of this late American sense of freedom in its infamous decision upholding the legality of abortion, Planned Parenthood v.

Nov 25, 2024 | ifstudies.org | John Shelton

“Shelton lauds the creation of a 'Family Policymaking Assessment,' which purported to analyze all new legislation from the standpoint of its impact on families. Yet the 'Assessment,' in the telling of long-time family policy scholar Allan Carlson, never had the teeth its supporters intended. As written, it 'avoided any language that would threaten the interests of big business,' Carlson wrote in his 2003 history of family policy, The American Way.

Nov 20, 2024 | providencemag.com | John Shelton

For nearly a decade, a strain of political theology known as “integralism” was ascendant. Kevin Vallier’s All The Kingdoms of the World (2023) tells the story of integralism’s rising star and explores the limits of its case for illiberal political rule. In doing so, Vallier leveled integralism’s reputation as a coherent philosophical movement.