Remembering Sara Henley
Nov 24, 2025 / By: Michael Spielman
Category: Miscellaneous
Thanks to America This Week, I’ve been on a top-ten kick of late. Novels, movies, songs, TV shows… There’s something satisfying and exceedingly challenging in trying to narrow such broad fields down to your ten favorites. Not the ten best, mind you—that’s a thoroughly impossible task—but favorites is at least manageable. I’ve tried to rope in friends and family, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (which reminds me, I need to rank drinks next). My ten favorite novels are fairly conventional. Lots of classics. They are, in no particular order: The Three Musketeers, Tom Sawyer, Les Miserables, That Hideous Strength, The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, Pride & Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Rings, and East of Eden. There’s a good chance we share some in common, which is more than can be said of my songs list.
Coming up with my ten favorite songs, it turns out, was a far more difficult task. I’ve read hundreds of novels in my 50 years, but I’ve heard…
Voddie Baucham’s Eleventh Commandment
Oct 09, 2025 / By: Michael Spielman
Category: Christian Living
Eric Metaxas sent out a video last week from 2021 titled “Biblical Justice vs. Social Justice.” It was from a panel discussion he’d participated in for Salem Media Group. The other two panelists were Charlie Kirk and Voddie Baucham. Charlie Kirk, as the whole world knows, was assassinated on September 10. Voddie Baucham died two weeks later of an unspecified medical emergency. Charlie was 31; Voddie was 56. So seeing the two of them sitting next to each other on stage was another pause-to-consider moment in a month full of pause-to-consider moments.
I got to see Voddie Baucham in person at the 2006 Desiring God National Conference. It was the same conference that introduced me to Tim Killer and Mark Driscoll. All three were standouts, but Voddie was the only one to talk about abortion—so I knew from the outset that he was made of sterner stuff. He pointed out…
Remembering Charlie
Sep 16, 2025 / By: Michael Spielman
Category: Miscellaneous
An entirely unknown Charlie Kirk was just five years old when I started working for the Center for Bio-ethical Reform. This was in January of 1999. I’m struck by this fact for two reasons. The first being that Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week amidst a large crowd of students on the campus of an American university, and my pro-life career began amidst a large crowd of students on the campus of an American university. For me, it was the University of Florida. I was there with the newly-minted Genocide Awareness Project, which displays giant pictures of abortion victims alongside images of traditionally-recognized victims of genocide. And when students or professors came up to say—as they did early and often, “How dare you compare abortion to slavery or the Holocaust?!” we were there to give a defense. But no one did it better than our director, Gregg Cunningham. He would hold court in front of these signs as the crowds grew and intensified, deftly deflecting their rage while relieving them of their abortion ignorance. But not everyone took it well, which is why we had crowd-control barricades and a constant police presence.
Towards the…
The Blurry Line Between Democracies and Death Cults
Sep 09, 2025 / By: Michael Spielman
Category: Abortion Arguments
Douglas Murray makes a poignant observation towards the end of his latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults—which examines Israel’s response to the brutal terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023. He notes that while Israel is engaged in a life-and-death struggle for its very survival, America is “obsessing about the exact date at which you should be able to abort a child,” and Britain is arguing about “when you might kill an old person.” Is this really “the highest [expression] of human achievement and peace?” Murray asks. Though I don’t know his position on abortion, I appreciate the implication. As Israel fights to protect the lives of its people, many in America and Britain fight to push the oldest and youngest of its people beyond the bounds of moral obligation. It’s a stark dichotomy, except for the fact that Israel is every bit as committed to abortion as America—at least in theory.
As I pointed out in December 2023, Israel kills more of its own children on any given day than Hamas did on October 7, and…
The D.C. Body Count is Much Worse than it Seems
Aug 21, 2025 / By: Michael Spielman
Category: Abortion Arguments
Is Washington, D.C. unacceptably dangerous, or is it not? You can add this to the long list of questions currently dividing Americans. President Trump says, yes, and has deployed federal personnel in an attempt to reign in the violence. His detractors say no and insist this is just the next stage in his relentless march towards authoritarianism. The left, you’ll remember, hates federal overreach (or they at least hate Donald Trump). Republicans can point to data indicating that Washington, D.C. is among the least safe cities in the world, and Democrats can point to data indicating that D.C. crime has decreased dramatically.
The problem with crime statistics, as Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi reminded us last week, is that they can be manipulated to communicate almost anything. Walter recalled doing a story for Time magazine which required him to monitor…
The Fantastic Five
Aug 05, 2025 / By: Michael Spielman
Category: Miscellaneous
My 12-year-old and I have seen more than our fair share of movies this summer—most of them thoroughly unremarkable, but weekend matinees aren’t a bad way to beat the heat in South Carolina. And it gets us out of the house, which is always agreeable to a homeschooling mom—even and perhaps especially during the summer months. It should come as no surprise in today’s cinematic landscape that our last two outings were both in support of comic book heroes. The first was super and the second fantastic. But those, of course, are just the titles.
Earlier this year, my son and I watched the original 1978 Superman. I’d seen and enjoyed it as a kid but found it almost unbearable as an adult. What were you thinking, Marlon Brando?! Were it not for Gene Hackman, I’d call it a complete disaster, and yet, lo and behold, the new Superman is dramatically worse. To call it terrible doesn’t do it justice. I didn’t leave the theater thinking, wow, that was bad. I left thinking, how did something so inane possibly get released? Among the movies I’ve seen this summer, Superman sits well behind Thunderbolts,…
