Jesse Russell

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A native of Livingston, Montana, Jesse Russell makes a living teaching, firefighting, and writing for a variety of popular journals and magazines. His academic work has been published in New Blackfriars and Explorations in Renaissance Culture, and he has an article titled, "The Contradictions in Catholic Neoconservatism," forthcoming in The Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP). Russell's book The Political Christopher Nolan: Liberalism and the Anglo-American Vision is also forthcoming from Lexington Books. He enjoys long distance running and spending time with his family.

Recent Essays

Antonin Scalia: A Man for All Seasons

Jesse Russell - May 9, 2023

Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy was ratified on June 24, 2022 as the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Rummaging the Word Hord

Jesse Russell - December 26, 2022

In order to reconcile competing and hostile cultures in our current, chaotic milieu, it is necessary to forge a politics of honesty and integrity. As hinted by The Wordhord’s emphasis on daily life, the true and good political life begins with the small things of home life.

Redeeming the Polis in Matt Reeves’ The Batman

Jesse Russell - April 18, 2022

The majority of Americans want peace and prosperity and cooperation. The biggest question is—and this is a question that The Batman does not answer, except by implication—where are the heroes willing to build this honest, just, and prosperous society?

Great. When Ya Leavin’? A Love Song for Montana

Jesse Russell - July 2, 2021

While every people has a right to cultural solidarity and (peaceful and just) defense of their traditions and heritage, every moral person (especially every Christian) is also called to a deep sense of humility, forgiveness, and ultimately love of neighbor—even when that other raises the housing prices literally ten-fold in twenty years.

Homecoming in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman

Jesse Russell - March 1, 2021

The Church provides a sacramental and moral framework as well as an ultimate sense of hope in The Irishman, and it is this sense of hope that is so desperately needed as we enter into the brave new world of the Biden-Harris era.

Contemporary Christian Fiction: The Example of Joshua Hren

Jesse Russell - November 6, 2020

In the Wine Press gathers together a host of rough-edged stories of American Christians living in the rise and fall of both Evangelical Catholic and Protestant American Christianity, which arose in the twilight of the Clinton era and peaked during the confluence of religious fervor and patriotism under the White House of George W. Bush.

“And the Word Was Made Flesh”: Placing Ethnicity in the Gospels and Making Conservative Politics Humane

Jesse Russell - April 16, 2020

It is a recognition of the beauty and goodness of ethnic diversity combined with a message of universal love and mercy that should be at the heart of a true Christian politics.

Martin Heidegger’s Lost Saints

Jesse Russell - February 17, 2020

Heidegger’s life and work are a lesson to so many confused, angry, and lonely young Western people today who feel out of place in a toxic post-millennial world torn by ethnic and religious strife and who are attracted to various strains of noxious neo-pagan and hate-filled thought.

Identity and Ethnos in Socrates’s Athens: A Response to Jordan Wales

Jesse Russell - March 26, 2018

Jordan Wales has recently gifted the conservative movement a sober and justly-timed critique of Richard Spencer and the alt-right. Unfortunately, much of the analysis...