JULIE HARTMAN
NATIONAL MEDIA HOST, AWARD-WINNING ESSAYIST
Julie Hartman was raised in Los Angeles. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University (class of ‘22), where she won the History Department’s William S. Ferguson Prize for her essay on Patrice Lumumba’s assassination.
In July of 2020, she discovered Dennis Prager’s work and emailed him to thank him for his influence on her thinking. In response, he invited her as a guest on his radio show. The following summer, Julie became a weekly on-air contributor to his nationally syndicated radio program. In August, 2021, at the age of 21, Julie guest-hosted three-hour broadcasts for both “The Dennis Prager Show” and “The Mike Gallagher Show,” becoming the youngest person to substitute host solo on a national program. Julie now has a show with Dennis — “Dennis and Julie” — that airs every Monday. Julie continues to serve as a standing guest radio host for all of Salem’s nationally syndicated shows, and three times a week hosts a show of her own, “Timeless,” on which she discusses timeless, eternal subjects.
The Poverty of our Abundance
JULIE HARTMAN
Indifference to God characterized my upbringing, but in time, the deficiencies of this approach became impossible to ignore.
What changed?
First, the realization that science does not offer a full understanding of the universe. Evolution tells how we developed from our ancestors, but how did first life emerge? Plant germination describes a tree’s growth, but how to account for the first seed? What is science’s first cause? There’s no hypothesis for this. Urges to survive and mate explain our primitive emotions, but not our full inventory: joy, wonder, and hope, as well as wistfulness, regret, and grief. Are creative masterpieces just the result of genomic code producing the capacity to (re)act to hard-wired impulses? Science used to have a sure-footed balance of modesty and confidence — it knew what it did know, what it didn’t know, and what it suspected but couldn’t prove. No more. You Will Follow The Science or You Will Suffer the Wrath of Its Inquisitors. To wonder whether there is more is to contemplate the Divine. And I did.
Next was to explore God’s channel to humanity: the Bible. Scripture makes visible our invisible potential. Its timeless insights about choices and consequences are unsurpassed, even by Shakespeare and Dante, the silver and bronze medalists. The eternal relevance and practical success of the Bible’s counsel signals Divine inspiration, evincing God’s presence.
The final phase was to look with new eyes at modern society and to observe the deadened souls of our contemporaries. Do you see what I see? The explanation: disdain for religion among the stylish and the self-promoting, those who worship status and its rewards, and whose mirror is the opinion others have of them. An always at-the-ready insult for all things religion is the membership pledge for our soi-disant sophisticated ruling class. We who respect God should recall the words that President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed in another context: “They are unanimous in their hatred of me – and I welcome their hatred!” To deny God is to consign yourself to a diminished interior life. No thank you, not for me. One who does not recognize what I mean might be in the early stages of the disorder.
Some, like Sam Harris, will object that the “formerly Christian countries of Europe,” as Professor Bernard Lewis called them, continue on without God or religion. But Europe’s engine is now running on the dregs and fumes of the Judeo-Christian high-octane cultural fuel that earlier generations supplied in abundance. The tank is empty. Without the stability and trust that a critical core of belief in God creates, the consequences are grim, and they are unfolding for Europeans before their atheistic, agnostic eyes, as if in time-lapse video. Europe is returning to its primitive, pagan origins. The New Dark Ages are nigh — and without dramatic course correction, we Americans are next in line.
God whispers His existence through the beneficial results that fidelity to His guidance secures and the harmful results that rejection of His principles guarantees. Shouldn’t we listen?