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James Diddams
Welcome to the Diddams blog, home of all my writing on Politics, Theology, Economics, Art and Philosophy.
My Writing
First Things Magazine:
- Bari Weiss or Protestant Franco: Which Way, Western Man? September 23rd, 2025. Wherein I ask what may be the most important question facing the American right today.
- Masculinity Is Tragic. May 14th, 2024. My reflection on Homer, Edith Stein, Mark Driscoll, and Bronze Age Pervert.
- The Real Problem at Wheaton College. 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.
Christianity Today
- Institutions Don’t Maintain Themselves – April 8th, 2025. The church and other institutions that give our lives shape require our commitment, our forgiveness, and our work.
Law & Liberty
- Who Are the Real “Realists”? – April 28th, 2025. Law & Liberty. Where I argue that “realism” in foreign policy has come to signify almost nothing but a rhetorical affectation—an all but meaningless phrase in resolving intra-conservative debates.
Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy
- The Sublime Terror of the Blue Angels – August 19th, 2025, Providence Magazine. Besides being beautiful and honing military readiness, demonstrations like the Blue Angels also function as a potent form of psychological warfare
- Striking Iran Will Not Change the Long-term Strategic Picture—America Should Still Do It. June 19th, 2025. “Neither regime change nor allowing Iran to acquire a nuke are realistic options. Instead, America must have the strategic resolve to strike Iran if necessary and the patience to await a grassroots uprising.”
- Civilizational Ethics Precede National Self-Interest. October 18th, 2024. Where I argue that discussions about America pursuing its own self-interest tend to be truncated because some kind of morality is always at the heart of statecraft.
- Legitimate Internationalism vs. Imperialism in Ukraine. May 6th, 2024. My essay arguing that America is best understood as a missionary civilization, not an imperial one.
- The Holocaust, Hamas, and a Post-Christian West. 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.
- On the “Medieval Question.” October 18, 2022. An essay on historiography and the role of the Medieval in our collective moral and political imagination.
- Cities of Men and Architecture of God: A Review of Philip Bess’ Till We Have Built Jerusalem. November 10, 2021.
- Either Meritocracy or the Common Good, Not Both: A Review of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. July 23, 2021.
- Red and Blue Christian Disunity: A Review of Yancey and Quosigk’s One Faith No Longer. September 13, 2021.
The Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Online
- Is Social Science ‘Science’?: A review of Jason Blakely’s We Built Reality – Religion and Liberty Online. My critique of a book devoted to one of my favorite subjects, philosophical hermeneutics, published with the Acton Institute.
- 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.
Mere Orthodoxy
- The Human Costs of Pornography. November 21, 2023. An essay about recognizing my own complicity in the industry of sexual exploitation.
The American Conservative
- A Weighty Education – The American Conservative. January 15, 2022. An essay on moral formation.
Podcast Appearances
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 99 | An America(s) First Foreign Policy? September 2, 2025.
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 96 | The West and Weapons of Mass Destruction 80 Years after Hiroshima. July 29, 2025.
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 95 | Why We Need the Apocalypse. July 21, 2025. James Diddams and Robert Nicholson interview Redeemer University’s Robert Joustra on the role of the apocalypse and the eschaton in fiction as well as international relations
- Foreign Policy Provcast Episode 92 | Is America Betraying Middle East Christians? June 25, 2025. The Provcast team interview Rich Ghazal, Executive Director of In Defense of Christians, to discuss the question of Christian persecution as it relates to US foreign policy
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 91 | Is Israel’s Fight for Survival also America’s Fight? June 19, 2025. Dr. Farhad Rezaei joins the Provcast to discuss the hard questions around the Israel-Iran conflict, including escalation, American involvement, and regime change
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 89 | The Sources of Iran’s Revolutionary Ideology. June 10, 2025. Providence Editor James Diddams and Hamilton Center Fellow Jozef Kosc at the University of Florida discuss the diverse and often non-Islamic sources of Iran’s revolutionary ideology.
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 88 | How Hindu Political Theology Halted, then Restarted Indian Nuclear Proliferation. May 22, 2025. Providence Editor James Diddams is joined by Bill Drexel to discuss his article “How Competing Hindu Theologies Drove India’s Nuclear Decision Making—In Opposite Directions.”
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 87 | Of American Popes and American Power in a Multipolar Age. May 16, 2025. Editors James Diddams, Marc LiVecche, Mark Tooley and Robert Nicholson discuss Pope Francis’ legacy, Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East, and the idea of “spheres of influence” in US grand strategy
- Foreign Policy Provcast, Episode 86 | Providence Magazine’s 10th Anniversary – May 7, 2025. Providence editors Mark Tooley, Marc LiVecche, James Diddams, and Robert Nicholson discuss the past and future of Providence as the magazine’s 10th anniversary comes up
ABOUT
Hello and welcome to JamesDiddams.org (the ‘org’ is short for ‘organon’). I am a writer based in Washington, DC. I am also the Managing Editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy, a publication of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
Citations
In my experience, we must help men accept their weaknesses — but without canonizing them. It can be good to “be vulnerable,” as is often said today. To admit we have suffered a wound can be vital, if it is true. But as James Diddams wrote in “Masculinity is Tragic” (First Things, May 14, 2024), “Men do not want to have their feelings of failure and weakness validated if it will not make them less of those things in reality.” We must help men face their weaknesses as men, that is, as a coherent expression of a desire for rising strength and a readiness to depend upon God. It is good for a man to know his weaknesses and to acknowledge them as such; for this helps him to live his masculine desire coherently: to strive, humbly, for the greatness that belongs to him in Christ.
- 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.
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