Briefly Reviewed: June 2025

Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite

By Cheryl Mendelson

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 256

Price: $28.99

Review Author: Preston R. Simpson

I picked up this book because I thought it might contain useful information about the state of marriage today. And because it was my intuitive but otherwise uninformed sense that traditional marriage vows are likely to be used by people who are serious about their Christian faith and who marry Christian partners, I thought this book might have something important to say about Christian marriage. I was wrong on both counts.

Vows examines marriage via a scattershot approach that proves uninformative. Its author, Cheryl Mendelson, has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rochester and a law degree from Harvard. She has taught philosophy at the college level, has practiced law, and is the author of both novels and nonfiction works. Mendelson undertook to research the origin of wedding vows in Western Christian culture. She demonstrates that they grew in part out of feudal vows that vassals and their lords pledged to one another in the Middle Ages. These vows were subsequently adapted to marriage agreements and then modified, expanded, and modernized in various ways over the centuries. She pays particular attention and gives credit to the 16th-century Anglican Thomas Cranmer for articulating them in elegant English. For those interested in the details of these changes over centuries and in their numerous variations, Mendelson gives extensive information.

Scattered throughout the book are observations about the state of marriage in America today, and this was where I had hoped to find some useful information or advice. I found little of value. Mendelson seems to say that couples who claim to have changed or grown apart over the years really just need to work harder at adapting. Yet in the same chapter she says that “being psychologically adult” means being ready “to pivot [to divorce, presumably] when…you see that you have erred.”

The author briefly describes and contrasts her two marriages. She entered the first impulsively in her early 20s with her college boyfriend, and the union endured for seven years before ending in divorce. The second took place considerably later, though when she was still in her childbearing years, and it persists happily as of the book’s writing decades later.

Mendelson says her interest in marriage vows began at her first, hastily arranged wedding when the judge “read out a wedding ceremony filled with ancient rhythms and words foreign to her Appalachian Presbyterian ears.” It included words such as troth, which prompted her groom to sarcastically ask the officiant for a definition. She admits she was probably “less mature than the average twenty-two year old,” and both sets of parents tried to talk them out of the marriage, but to no avail.

Mendelson blames her first husband for the failure of the marriage, describing him as unfaithful and constantly angry at her, their marriage, and the institution of marriage. Their circle of friends was almost universally hostile to marriage, and most of the unions in their orbit broke up. “The tracks of this miserable marital experience are all over this book,” she writes, prompting her to examine all aspects of love and marriage.

This was where I began to get confused about the case Mendelson is trying to make. There does not seem to be any connection between wedding vows and the success of the subsequent marriage. Her own experience bears this out. Both of her weddings were performed with traditional vows, more or less along the lines of Archbishop Cranmer’s design. Yet one was a disaster from the beginning, while the other is a success. It seems to this benighted observer that the success of the marriage has everything to do with the maturity and temperament of the parties, their respect for each other, their willingness to keep promises and compromise, and little or nothing to do with the vows they recited at the wedding.

Mendelson concludes that her first husband did not love her, attributing this to the fact that he was an identical twin. Whether that is true, I have no idea. I do know from observation that it is not uncommon for otherwise accomplished and intelligent women to make terrible choices regarding men. And in the rare cases in which women have confided in me about their marital problems, they mentioned evident but unheeded signs of the husband’s flaws before the wedding. The opposition of Mendelson’s parents to the wedding fits that scenario.

I hoped she would say more about the social setting of her second marriage. As mentioned, she recounted contempt for marriage in the social circle of her first one. She and her second husband are academics in New York City, and their wedding was performed by a judge, so I doubt many of their inner circle are devout Christians or hold traditional Christian values. If they are, she makes no mention of it. So, what is different? I do not mean to suggest that New York progressives cannot form happy marriages. But since Mendelson seems to place some blame for the first marriage’s failure on her friends, I was curious to know if and how the second is different. Was her husband married before, and what was his experience? Do her current friends share her reverence for traditional vows and think they hold marriages together? She doesn’t say.

Mendelson briefly traces the changes in marriage laws over the past 60 years or so, which brought equality among the races and between the sexes as well as changes to make divorce much easier. She notes that the almost simultaneous introduction of the Pill and no-fault divorce “created a divorce epidemic” but says no more about it. In the course of her examination of marriage, she also examines polyamory, polygamy, forced marriages, open marriages, communal societies, and cohabitation and finds them all seriously flawed. However, she sees the flaws as practical problems, often regarding difficulties for women, rather than as moral problems. And she says almost nothing about the effects of these arrangements on the children.

There have always been problems in marriages (recall Adam and Eve), but my oversimplified sense is that beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, there has been a widespread decline in courtesy and respect for others and a corresponding increase in self-centeredness. Mendelson even briefly cites a 2008 book “that sheds light on the social decline of promises” but does not seem to see this as the core of the problem. I worry more about these social changes than about the move away from traditional wedding vows.

An Almost Insurmountable Evil: How Obama’s Deep State De­filed the Catholic Church and Executed the Wuhan Plandemic

By Mike McCormick

Publisher: Bombardier Books

Pages: 240

Price: $28.99

Review Author: Michael S. Rose

Mike McCormick’s An Almost Insurmountable Evil: How Obama’s Deep State Defiled the Catholic Church and Executed the Wuhan Plandemic is a firestorm synthesis of geopolitics, ecclesiastical intrigue, and the kind of transnational skullduggery Malachi Martin might have written back in his Windswept House days. From its opening salvo, the book is clear in its grim assessment: Barack Obama, the Vatican, and the U.S. intelligence apparatus orchestrated a strategic defilement of the Catholic Church that culminated in the installation of Pope Francis, capitulation to globalist aims, and, as the title unsubtly suggests, the unleashing of COVID-19 as part of a larger Deep State operation.

McCormick, a former stenographer for the White House Press Office, is not shy about his credentials. For six years he was tethered to Joe Biden and had the sort of proximity to power that permits a man to see the rotted sinews holding together the political establishment. He’s haunted by memories of the oppressive fluorescence of the West Wing, the low murmur of strategizing aides, and the rhythmic, near-ritualistic press conferences at which scripted narratives were dispensed to a compliant media. That world of illusion is the very subject of An Almost Insurmountable Evil, though what McCormick proposes is less revelation than vivisection. With the precision of a man who once made his living transcribing the words of those who steer the ship of state, he dissects the seamless merger of Church and Deep State, revealing a diseased marrow.

At the black heart of the book looms the disgraced figure of Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, a man McCormick unambiguously dubs “the Jeffrey Epstein of the Vatican.” The analogy, though evocative, is never fully drawn; rather, the hints are clear enough for those willing to follow McCormick’s implicative breadcrumbs. From his days as archbishop of Newark, McCarrick’s private beach house on the Jersey Shore functioned as a site of what the book rightly defines as clerical predation: seminarians invited, beds shared, and unspoken horrors enacted in the quietude of crashing waves and whispered justifications.

The real terror, McCormick asserts, is not merely McCarrick’s personal depravities but his utility, his role as a Vatican intelligence asset, groomed for infiltration, a chess piece deftly maneuvered into place by those with grander designs. Here, the book lingers on the murky connections between the CIA and the Catholic hierarchy, a relationship stretching back to the Cold War but weaponized anew in the 21st century. McCarrick, McCormick argues, was the point man, his perversions not a liability but an insurance policy — an operative whose weaknesses were known, cataloged, and, most importantly, exploitable.

Then there is the fateful conclave of 2013 at which, if McCormick’s thesis holds, the highest echelons of power tilted the world in a direction so subtle yet so seismic that only now are its reverberations fully felt. McCarrick, summoned like an old spy for one last job, supposedly courted Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, the Argentine archbishop little known outside Latin America. Multiple meetings in Buenos Aires before the conclave, McCormick suggests, were in service to a singular objective: the installation of a pope who would serve the interests of Obama’s globalist vision.

Why Bergoglio? McCormick posits that the answer lies in his pre-existing hostility toward the United States, his pliability on matters of immigration, and his willingness to recast Catholic social doctrine in a manner that would align seamlessly with the Democratic Party’s ideological objectives. As Pope Francis, McCormick argues, Bergoglio became a de facto ambassador of the Obama administration, legitimizing open-border policies, condemning nationalism, and shaping a Church that, rather than opposing the encroaching secular liberalism of the age, became its moral veneer.

McCarrick, as McCormick tells it, was tireless in his post-conclave endeavors. A globe-trotting emissary for the Vatican’s new geopolitical program, he touched down in Bosnia, Jordan, the Philippines, and beyond — always evangelizing the new message that the Church, like the world, must be open, unbarriered, and unbarricaded. Unfettered immigration, no longer a matter of policy but of alleged Christian duty, became the defining moral issue of the papacy. It was a seamless alliance: Obama and Francis, partners in the reconfiguration of Western civilization, the former engineering policy, the latter sanctifying it.

Enter Biden — amiable, avuncular, his public face a mask for the machinations McCormick claims to have witnessed firsthand. If Obama was the architect, Biden was the middleman, sealing deals with cartel-linked politicians in Honduras, legitimizing figures whose fortunes and influence were built on the bodies of trafficked souls. The book alleges that Biden personally brokered a sinister agreement with Honduran president Pepe Sosa Lobo at a CIA compound in that Central American country, a pact dubbed Operation Anvil, purportedly designed to facilitate drug and human trafficking under the pretense of diplomatic engagement. The porous southern U.S. border, far from being an unintended consequence of bureaucratic incompetence, was, in McCormick’s framing, the very objective.

The COVID-19 pandemic looms in the background, a crisis that, in McCormick’s telling, cemented the Church’s submission to the dictates of the Deep State. Francis, already aligned with the globalist vision, became a willing participant in the pandemic narrative, his papal decrees functioning as a religious imprimatur for government lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the sacramentalization of biomedical compliance. The coordinated response to the coronavirus, McCormick argues, was never merely about health; it was a final, devastating assertion of control, a restructuring of global power in which the Vatican played a crucial, complicit role.

The book’s strength is also its weakness: its breathless, relentless accumulation of conspiracy, its refusal to pause, to reflect, to concede even the possibility of an alternative reading. Every action, every historical event is interpreted through the lens of a singular, overarching narrative: a grand, shadowy design in which every player is perfectly positioned, every development part of an intricate scheme. The world McCormick depicts is too seamless, the connections too perfectly drawn. It is a universe in which everything connects but nothing is ever definitively proven.

Is An Almost Insurmountable Evil persuasive? For those already wildly suspicious of McCarrick, Obama, Biden, and the CIA, the book is believable, even revelatory. For others, it will read as a paranoiac masterpiece in which the lines between fact and speculation dissolve under the sheer force of McCormick’s conviction. Either way, its red-pilling is unforgettable, not quite allowing the reader to return to the comfort of the known world.

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