The Search for a Christian Nation: Christian Nationalism and the American Founding
“Christian Nationalism” and the Appeal to History Is America a Christian nation—or was it ever? This vexed question, debated for decades, has been given a new lease on life by the heated and sometimes obsessive conversation around so-called “Christian nationalism”...
A Theology of Money
Among the many sayings of Jesus that have echoed down through the ages, few have continued to sound so loudly or uncomfortably in our ears as his warning, “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” But this does not keep...
The Prophet of Re-Alignment: Reading Michael Lind in the Ruins of the Old Republic
It has become a tired cliché to lament the polarization of American politics, yet after a year that witnessed a post-election assault on the US Capitol, and in which even epidemiology became a partisan issue, few would contest the truth...
Covid-19, One Year On, Pt II: The Limits of Politics
One year ago today, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US passed 85,000, surpassing China where the virus had begun, and giving us the unenviable distinction of being #1 in the world. Today, America still holds that...
COVID-19, One Year On, Pt. I: Threnody for a Buried Nation
One year ago tonight, I sat in the bar of the Hotel George in downtown Washington, DC, waiting for my friend to arrive. The TV in the corner was tuned to ESPN, but for once there was no game on....
Called to Judgment: A Critical Review of “Fratelli Tutti”
Like a prophetic denunciation from the days of ancient Israel, the Covid-19 pandemic has come upon our self-absorbed and decadent civilization like a bolt from the blue, throwing into sharp relief the follies and fault-lines in our moral thinking and...
Our Lives or Our Freedoms: The Fear of Tyranny in a Time of Pandemic
There’s a famous scene in the movie, Braveheart, a 1995 film that became something of a classic among embattled Christian conservatives who liked to see our own battle with “Big Government” in the romanticized terms of a Scottish epic. Riding...
“No Wealth But Life”: Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic
Two weeks ago we awoke from our dogmatic slumber of American exceptionalism to realize that the coronavirus was not merely some “Chinese virus,” or the bane of aging Italians. America, and her public officials in particular, have been playing catch...
A National Conservative Awakening
I made my way to the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Washington D.C. for the National Conservatism Conference Sunday evening with some trepidation, unsure what to expect, and feeling wildly out of place among what seemed like a crowd of thinktank wonks,...
In Defense of Nationalism: Notes on Yoram Hazony and His Critics
You didn’t have to be a close follower of contemporary political theory to know that Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism was going to be the equivalent of shooting a paintball into a hornet’s nest. Here was a book with...