Category: Culture War
The World We Have and the World We Want
The pace of online discourse makes life difficult for those who wish to think seriously about Christianity and politics. By now, the takes have begun to cool regarding the recent fracas between Sohrab Ahmari, David French, and their respective factions...
The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way: Against the Culture War
One of the saddest consequences of the culture war is that it has managed to make people boring. The culture war has made us predictable, even if individual people are anything but. The libertarian online troll is in real life...
Debating the Actual Crisis of Liberalism
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the Mortara debate prompted by Fr. Cessario at First Things, I want to ask a more general question about the state of play between the more radical anti-liberals in the religious conservative...
Evangelicalism’s ‘Flight 93’ Moment: Reflections on the Nashville Statement
What does the Nashville Statement mean? And to whom should we look to help us understand? Conservative evangelicals have been gripped by such questions since the CBMW released the statement two weeks ago. Yet while its advocates and defenders have...
The Weightier Things of the Law: A Case Against Conscience-Binding in the Schooling Debate
As the nation’s schools continue to move down the path paved for them in the Obergefell decision, many Christian parents are pulling their children out of the public schools. Though the exact reasons for doing this vary from person to...
Is it really that bad?: Christianity, Secularism, and the Apocalypse
I think it was C. S. Lewis who once said of a new friend, maybe Owen Barfield, that he had read all the right books only to come to all the wrong conclusions. Lewis’s quote came to mind on several...
The Religious Right Is Not a Subsidiary of the Alt-Right
In a recent essay for The New Republic, religion reporter Sarah Posner contends that the Religious Right has “effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda.” By effectively wedding themselves to Trump’s narrative about ‘American...
A Social Justice Warrior in King Roderick’s Court
Last Thursday’s “Time for the Benedict Option?” discussion hosted by Plough, First Things, and The American Conservative was a great summary of the Benedict Option debate so far and where things ought to go from here. You can watch the...
The “New Alarmism” is not new and is not alarmism.
When asked about the Holy Roman Empire the French philosophe Voltaire once quipped that said empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. I had something like that thought while reading Dr. James K. A. Smith’s piece for the...
Dr. Moore and the Politics of Dinner Parties
On Monday night I got on the E train in Forest Hills and headed to the Union League Club on East 37th Street to hear Russell Moore, President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the...