Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Faith
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WaPo: ‘Advanced Colorectal Cancer Has Strengthened My Faith’
Washington Post Op-Ed: Cancer May Take My Life. Here’s What a Hymn Made Me See, by Megan Basham: As a Christian, I wish I could say I received my 2024 diagnosis of early-onset advanced colorectal cancer in a beatific fashion, battling fear and grief with the time-honored spiritual weapons of prayer, fasting and scripture reading.…
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Helfand: Why the Ten Commandments Don’t Belong in Public Schools
Dispatch Faith: Why the Ten Commandments Don’t Belong in Public Schools, by Michael Helfand (Pepperdine): Church-state separation is on the retreat at the Supreme Court—and with good reason. The once-dominant “wall of separation” metaphor never quite fit the nation’s constitutional tradition or historical practice. From Founding-era practices like legislative prayer and military chaplains to later…
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Searching for God in Silicon Valley
The Free Press: Searching for God in Silicon Valley, by Avital Balwit (Chief of Staff to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic): The work of building frontier AI has brought us to the edge of where He might be. A running joke at Bay Area parties is that AI researchers are “building God.” This, of course,…
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Finding Meaning in Suffering
Dispatch Faith: The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It., by Kelly M. Kapic (Covenant College), M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall (Biola University) & Jason McMartin (Biola University) (Co-Authors, When the Journey Hurts: Finding Meaning in Suffering for Heart, Mind, and Soul (2026)): Benjamin Franklin famously declared that only death and taxes are…
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Congratulations, Pepperdine Caruso Law Class of 2026
We honored the Pepperdine Caruso Law Class of 2026 last week with several celebrations, including: Wednesday Morning: 3L Breakfast Wednesday Evening: Baccalaureate Service I had the honor of inscribing all of the Pepperdine Caruso Law branded Bibles we gave to the graduates with their names and the five verses I used in my message on…
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Why Don’t Bad Things Happen to Bad People?
Christianity Today: Gen Z Isn’t Asking Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Jared Dodson (Bushnell University): Christians have long asked how a good God can let evil happen. My students want to know when the evil will get their due. At church and in evangelical schools alike, I was raised to ask the…
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Faith, Marriage, and the ‘Unequally Yoked’
Ryan Burge (Washington University), Who Marries Whom? Faith, Partners, and the Unequally Yoked: There’s this phrase I heard over and over again growing up in a Southern Baptist Church – “don’t be unequally yoked.” It’s a reference to a verse from 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness…
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Make the Sabbath Great Again
The Free Press: Make the Sabbath Great Again, by Max Raskin (NYU): As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the monuments in Washington, D.C., will feature prominently—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the country’s legacy is not made of marble. The Founders erected monuments of ideas, and none is so central to our…
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Reflections on Robert Prevost’s First Year as Pope Leo
The Dispatch: A Pope You Don’t Have To Think About Every Day, by George Weigel (Ethics & Public Policy Center): Shortly after the funeral of Pope Francis last April 26, the First Things website began running an essay series in which Catholics around the world reflected on the kind of pope they hoped the impending conclave would…
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Ivy League Students Suffer From Religious Illiteracy
Washington Post: Ivy League Students Are Suffering From Religious Illiteracy, by Gregory Conti (Princeton): Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech. The talk didn’t seem to be landing with the students. Finally, he realized why: The speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten…
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Near-Death Experiences and the Christian Hope of Heaven
Christianity Today: Are Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Heaven?, by Andrew Wilson (Pastor, King’s Church London; Author, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (2023)): Writing about heaven is different from writing about other Christian doctrines. Some books on the new heaven and new earth are so imaginative and speculative that they become untethered…
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The One Idea That Ended Slavery: Every Human Being Is Created in the Image of God
Dispatch Faith: The One Idea That Ended Slavery, by Tomer Persico (Shalom Hartman Institute; Author, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea (NYU Press 2025)): The oldest known records of slavery come from Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. Then Egypt. Then China. Then Mesopotamia, of course, and Greece, and Rome.…
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Writing With AI Robs Us of God’s Gifts
Christianity Today: To Write Well Is Human, by Nadya Williams (Ashland University): As Christians, we are called to love God with all our soul, heart, mind, and strength (Luke 10:27). Using AI to write robs us of opportunities to fulfill this commandment. With enough use over enough time, it will reduce our capacity to read…
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Department of Justice Releases 565-Page Report on Biden Administration’s Anti-Christian Bias
New York Times, Trump Administration Casts Host of Policies Under Biden as Anti-Christian: The Justice Department on Thursday accused the Biden administration of pushing policies that were unfair to Christians, releasing a report that amounted to the latest rhetorical broadside by the Trump administration over what it calls the “weaponization” of government. The 197-page document,…
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WaPo: Society Needs More Belief and Less Skepticism
Washington Post: Skepticism Is Tearing Society Apart. Belief is the Answer, by Christopher Beha (Author, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026)): Twenty-five years ago, I decided, in the self-conscious manner of late adolescence, to live my life as a skeptic. Having given up the Catholic faith in which I’d been raised,…
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WSJ: The Economics of Religion
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: The Economics of Religion, by Roland Fryer (Harvard): Religion is one of the most successful enterprises in human history. Churches [in] the U.S. alone collect well over $100 billion a year in donations. Billions of people globally are adherents to a religion. The institutions are durable. The customers are loyal. And the product—moral…
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Non-Religious Artemis II Astronaut Brought to Tears When He Saw a Chaplain’s Cross on Return to Earth
NEW: Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman reflects on being MOVED to tears by the Christian cross after returning to Earth from the historic expedition: “When I got back on the on the ship — I’m not really a religious person — but there was just no other avenue for me to explain… pic.twitter.com/yk2JBIkxrN — Fox…
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NY Times: ‘The Reason I’m Not an Atheist Is That I Think the Philosophical Arguments Against It Are Unanswerable’
New York Times Op-Ed: ‘The Reason I’m Not an Atheist Is That I Think the Philosophical Arguments Against It Are Unanswerable’, by Peter Wehner (Trinity Forum): David Bentley Hart is one of the world’s most formidable and provocative theological minds. He is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, a philosopher, a cultural commentator and a…
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‘I Am Iranian. I Am Christian. I Carry Scars.’
Christianity Today: My Family Resisted Iran’s Regime. My Hope Is Not in Foreign Intervention., by Sara Afshari (Oxford): In recent weeks, Iran has been plunged deeper into war. Airstrikes have hit cities, energy infrastructure, and residential areas. Reports—fragmented and difficult to verify—suggest widespread destruction of homes, hospitals, and public spaces. Communication blackouts have made it…
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WaPo: Faith Guides Jimmy Lai As China Slowly Kills Him
Washington Post Op-Ed: What Guides My Father As China Slowly Kills Him, by Claire Lai: Since 2020, my father, Jimmy Lai, has been held in solitary confinement for the crime of defending democracy. Though his jailers in the Chinese Communist Party have kept us apart physically, I have received regular letters from him. Reading his…
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NY Times: How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying
New York Times, How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying: How would you live if you knew when you were going to die? When Ben Sasse announced last December that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he called it a death sentence, but he noted that he’d had one…
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The Upsurge In Gen Z Catholic Converts: ‘The Most Punk-Rock Thing I Could Do’
Washington Post: Awakening, by Matthew Schmitz (Co-Founder, Compact): What explains the upsurge in Catholic converts, many of whom seem to be young? One factor, Julia Yost suggests below, is the importance of images for a generation raised on TikTok. If we’re becoming a postliterate society, it will be hard for a textual faith such as…
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Easter Monday: The Rebellious Act of Rolling Back the Stone
Christianity Today: The Rebellious Act of Rolling Back the Stone, by Richard Mouw (Former President, Fuller Theological Seminary): Mary Magdalene’s role in the Easter story certainly deserves an upgrade. Another time in the ancient past, the Lord searched for a woman in a garden. On that occasion, the woman and her husband hid from their…
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Easter Sunday NY Times Debate: Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?
New York Times, Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate.: A Christian atheist [Bart Ehrman (North Carolina)] joins Ross Douthat. Did Jesus actually rise from the dead? Heal the sick? Turn water into wine? How close do the Gospel stories take us to what really happened at the beginning of Christianity? This is one…
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Holy Saturday: Scandal and Grace
Christianity Today: The Scandal and Grace of Christ’s Saturday in the Grave, by Hardin Crowder: If we are honest, many of us do not know what to do with Holy Saturday. Good Friday is terrible, but it is also dramatic and full of passion. Easter Sunday is triumphant, radiant, and full of song. But Holy…