Author: Shalem John

Then Then the angel who had been talking with me woke me, as though I had been asleep. 2 “What do you see now?” he asked. I answered, “I see a golden lampstand holding seven lamps, and at the top there is a reservoir for the olive oil that feeds the lamps, flowing into them through seven tubes. 3 And I see two olive trees carved upon the lamp-stand, one on each side of the reservoir. 4 What is it, sir?” I asked. “What does this mean?” 5 “Don’t you really know?” the angel asked. “No, sir,” I said, “I…

Pastor Justin Anderson drove up the winding road to his new congregation’s church campus, nestled between two steep green hills and moments from the Pacific Ocean. The previous Sunday, he’d preached his first sermon to his new flock. Now it was Tuesday; the church’s school was in session, and its offices were alight with staff members ready to greet the week. Anderson didn’t know that this first Sunday would be his only Sunday at Calvary Palisades. He didn’t know that on this particular Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the Los Angeles–area Palisades fire would begin to burn. In that morning’s staff…

 “If I wish to name-drop, I have only to list my ex-friends.”  So wrote editor and essayist Norman Podhoretz in the early pages of a 1999 book titled (unsurprisingly) Ex-Friends. Podhoretz, who died last month at age 95, was until his mid-30s part of New York’s left-of-center intellectual community. He broke with it once the “New Left” became more extreme and friendly to Marxism and communism.  Born in Brooklyn in 1930, Podhoretz was the son of Jewish immigrants who came to America from a region that has changed hands between Poland and Ukraine in the century since. In 1956, he…