Rara Sh

What's the hardest question you've ever been asked? I've given thousands of lectures around the country to engaged, thoughtful, curious university and church audiences and have always made it a practice to allow for as many questions as possible. Here are the most interesting ones I've been asked, and the answers I gave. Some of the questions and answers are easy, some hard; some profound, some silly; some tragic, some funny; most of them thought-provoking and all of them, I hope, entertaining.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe. In To Overthrow the World, Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes.

Long before the European Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution, which we often take to mark the birth of the modern revolt against religious explanations of the world, brave people doubted the power of the gods. Religion provoked skepticism in ancient Greece, and heretics argued that history must be understood as a result of human action rather than divine intervention. They devised theories of the cosmos based on matter and notions of matter based on atoms.

Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women's Liberation dives deep into the occult roots of the movement, detailing the lives of some of its most prominent figures and the esoteric beliefs that inspired and motivated them. Since the 1970s, everything we learn about the history of the women's movement has been subject to gatekeeping by radicals who run women's studies departments in universities. But there's an entire history that has been obscured from public view.

Weikart reveals the startling and fascinating truth about the most hated man of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler was a pantheist who believed nature was God. In Hitler's Religion, Weikart explains how the laws of nature became Hitler's only moral guide - how he became convinced he would serve God by annihilating supposedly "inferior" human beings and promoting the welfare and reproduction of the allegedly superior Aryansin accordance with racist forms of Darwinism prevalent at the time.

For four generations men have been subjected to some pretty damning accusations. They're the oppressors of women. Their misogyny is the sole cause of the much-hated wage gap. They are guilty of the original sins of privilege and institutional sexism. And this says nothing about the rank mockery and, often times, outright hatred men receive in the media, government, and our schools. But perhaps the most damning accusation of them all is that men are no longer needed. That they are now somehow obsolete.

Best-selling author Peter Kreeft presents a series of brilliant essays about many of the issues that increasingly divide our Western civilization and culture. He states that "these essays are not new proposals or solutions to today's problems. They are old. They have been tried, and have worked. They have made people happy and good. That is what makes them so radical and so unusual today. The most uncommon thing today is common sense".

Many Christians feel that they are being opposed at every turn by what seems to be a well-orchestrated political and cultural campaign to de-Christianize every aspect of Western culture. They are right, and it goes even further back than the Obama Administration. In Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion, Benjamin Wiker argues that it is liberals who seek to establish an official state religion: one of unbelief.

The year 2017 is the 500th-year anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany - the event that marked the beginning of the Reformation and the end of unified Christianity. For Catholics, it was an unjustified rebellion by the heterodox; for Protestants, the release of true and purified Christianity from centuries-old enslavement to corruption, idolatry, and error. Benjamin Wiker's account rejects the common distortions of Catholic, Protestant, Marxist, Freudian, or secularist retellings of this world-changing event.

You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker.