jamesdiddams.org

James Diddams

Welcome to the Diddams blog, home of all my writing on Politics, Theology, Economics, Art and Philosophy.

My Writing

• Public Life, Private Vice in American Life – Review of Marvin Olasky’s Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden. February 16, 2024. A review of Marvin Olasky’s latest book on the connection between inner, private life and public leadership.
• The Human Costs of Pornography – Mere Orthodoxy. November 21, 2023. An essay about recognizing my own complicity in the industry of sexual exploitation.
• The Holocaust, Hamas, and a Post-Christian West – Providence Magazine. November 17, 2023. Where I discuss the decline of the Christian moral imagination in America and Europe as it pertains to Israel and Jewish people more broadly.
• Is Social Science ‘Science’?: A review of Jason Blakely’s We Built Reality – Religion and Liberty Online. April 5th, 2023. My appreciative critique of a book devoted to one of my favorite subjects, philosophical hermeneutics, published with the Acton Institute.
• The Real Problem at Wheaton College – First Things. November 30, 2022. An essay which is at once an apologia for and a critique against my alma mater, the institution I owe above all others, Wheaton College.
• On the “Medieval Question” – Providence Magazine. October 18, 2022. An essay on historiography and the role of the Medieval in our collective moral and political imagination.
• Economists as the High Priests of Liberalism – Providence Magazine. An essay on social science. December 14th, 2022.
• A Weighty Education – The American Conservative. January 15, 2022. An essay on moral formation.
• Cities of Men and Architecture of God: A Review of Philip Bess’ Till We Have Built Jerusalem – Providence Magazine. November 10, 2021.
• Either Meritocracy or the Common Good, Not Both: A Review of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit – Providence Magazine. July 23, 2021
• Red and Blue Christian Disunity: A Review of Yancey and Quosigk’s One Faith No Longer – Providence Magazine. September 13, 2021.
• Emergency Executive Powers: Not Needed Indefinitely – Mercatus Center. April 17, 2020 White paper coauthored with Christos Makridis and Weifeng Zhong.
• Who’s Afraid of Integralists? – Juicy Ecumenism. April 14, 2021
• Review of Daniel K. Williams’ “The Politics of the Cross” – Juicy Ecumenism. June 10, 2021
• Is Integralism a Serious Answer to Liberal Progressivism? – Juicy Ecumenism. May 5, 2021. My summary of the University of Dallas 2021 Liberalism vs. Integralism conference.
• Review of The Gospel Coalition‘s Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church – Juicy Ecumenism. July 27, 2021

Citations

• Niall Ferguson, “Get Ready to Live With Covid’s Hassles Forever” – Bloomberg Opinion. June 27th, 2021. Historian Niall Ferguson references my Mercatus Center white paper in an article about the difficulty with reducing the size of the state once it has increased in response to a crisis.

According to a Mercatus Center paper published last year by Weifeng Zhong, Christos Makridis and James Diddams, “The eight presidents since 1976 have declared a total of 64 national emergencies under the National Emergencies Act, 35 of which are still in effect to this day and most of which outlasted their motivating emergencies.” The oldest of the 35, “Blocking Iranian Government Property,” was declared in 1979. I was 14 years old.

• Liberal Arts, Piety, and the Past: Responding to James Diddams’ First Things Piece – Anxious Bench. December 13th, 2022. Joey Cochran, professor of History at Wheaton College, responds to my First Things essay on the real problem at Wheaton College. December 13th, 2022.

Provocatively entitled hit pieces, putting Wheaton College under public scrutiny, have become a novel bromide in the era of evangelical fragmentation… James Diddams’s piece is [different] because it hails from an institutional insider, a recent graduate. Reproofs like this warrant more than callous dismissal. They ought to be heeded.