If you’ve ever looked around at the chaos of the current moment and wondered, "Who could have seen this coming?" I have an answer: Walker Percy.
Percy, an American writer, died 35 years ago this week—long before Trump, Twitter, TikTok, or transgender sports debates. But more than half a century ago, he eerily foresaw something like 2025, in which technology, tribalism, and spiritual emptiness converge. If we’re to find our way through the madness, maybe we should listen to what he had to say.
"A serious novel about the destruction of the United States and the end of the world should perform the function of prophecy in reverse," Percy wrote of his 1971 novel, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. "The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end."
The US, Ukraine, Cain, Abel - and you
Over the past few weeks, the United States of America reversed course on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in multiple …