A Thousand Liveried Angels Lackey Her: In Memoriam Nancy Snyder
Fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things. ~ C. S. Lewis High tea is a long-established Sunday evening tradition at L’Abri. The thinking is that after a large Sunday lunch following church, dinner is not...
Conservatism, Out of Decadence
In a review of Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society, Tara Isabella Burton argued that the way out of decadence is to have actual public conversation and debate about how our politics can be reconnected to something transcendent or, at...
Seven Notes on Bostock v Clayton County and the Future of Social Conservatism
At this point anyone concerned with the future of religious institutions in the United States is already aware of this week’s ruling in Bostock v Clayton County. (Oyez has the key facts; the folks at Volokh Conspiracy put together a summary...
Keep Christianity Weird
Oliver O’Donovan begins the sixth chapter of his Desire of the Nations, a chapter concerned with the status and legitimacy of Christendom, by considering what made the political witness of the early church compelling:
Busena and Emmanuel’s Story: Refugees Seeking Peace
This is a bit of an unusual post for us. Here’s the story: Through my church I recently became aware of a refugee situation in Lincoln involving a young South Sudanese man named Emmanuel Chol who recently lost his refugee...
Thinking Christianly About the Ahmaud Arbery Lynching
Let’s start here. This is what we know about what happened in February in Brunswick GA when Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed according to the New York Times: BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Ahmaud Arbery loved to run. It was how...
Liberalism, the American Right, and the Place of Love in Politics
The debate about the common good currently roiling American conservatism is not a new one. In the 1960s it vexed National Review contributors, with William F. Buckley dismissing Pope John XXIII’s encyclical on social progress “Mater et Magistra,” with a...
Augustine Amongst the Strong Gods
This is a time of ferment on the American right; that much has become abundantly clear. The post-Reagan consensus built around social conservatism and economic libertarianism is failing, trampled down by an economy that has left middle America behind and...
Nations and Nation-States: A Question for National Conservatives
Early in his book The Fate of Africa Martin Meredith describes the… we’ll call it “unconventional” method by which sub-Saharan Africa was divided in the late 19th century at the Conference of Berlin. Nigeria, for example, contained as many as 250...
The Key Question for the Sanders Campaign
Last night Bernie Sanders, unsurprisingly, won the New Hampshire primary. FiveThirtyEight now gives him a 38% of winning the Democratic nomination—his leading rival, at this point, is a brokered convention, which the site gives a 33% chance of happening. Prior...