Category: Politics
Why (Not) Masking Matters: A Dissent
Without qualification, masking has been one of the most contentious issues for church leaders to face over the last two years. For some, it is a matter of health and preserving life. For others, it is a matter of liberty...
“Those Heathenish Christians”: John Robinson’s Warning to the Puritans and to Us
“You will say they deserved it,” wrote the Separatist pastor John Robinson in 1623, after he first heard about the killings. The recipient of this letter was Pilgrim leader William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony in America. Robinson had...
We Became American: Why the Right is Wrong about Afghan Refugees
In 1969, my father escaped Libya in the back of a Red Cross ambulance just after Moammar Qaddafi overthrew King Idris I. Just six years old, my father, along with my aunts and grandparents, fled directly from Tripoli to Baltimore, where he lived for...
Starfish Stories
At the climax of the recent wannabe-blockbuster film The Suicide Squad[1], a giant mind-controlling starfish is wreaking havoc across a nondescript non-American city when the team of super-villains (who are, from a story perspective, the heroes of the movie) must...
The Maniac and the Theorist: Chesterton on Critical Theory
It does not matter how beautiful a house seems, how stately its design, how lofty its ceiling, or how well intentioned its builders; a house built on sand will fall when the rain comes (Matt. 7:27). Ultimately, the premises or...
Government: Ally or Antagonist?
In years past, Christians were an ascendant force in culture. More recently, they have become a forgotten relic. Whether cultural force or relic, governing authorities rarely had cause to make Christians uncomfortable. But the coronavirus pandemic led to regional lockdowns...
The Metaphysical Stalemate Behind Political Divisions
It’s been over 35 years since Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck published The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Lindbeck wrote The Nature of Doctrine as an attempt to grapple with the incommensurability of intra-Christian division, and...
Cultural Assimilation and the Curious Cases of Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal
After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, educator Jane Elliot held an experiment with her elementary school students that she called “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes.” The experiment became famous, and she repeated it for various audiences for years,...
Racism and Whiteness: Bad Words We Have to Live With
Like anyone who has thought about the problem of race for more than five minutes, I find the topic of language and terminology vexing. Terms like racism, anti-blackness, ethnocentric, antiracist, white supremacy, whiteness, prejudice, (and now quite unfortunately) woke or...
What Theonomy Gets Wrong About the Law
Theonomy talk has resurfaced. Perhaps, this is the Protestant-evangelical concomitant to the Integralist debate presently occupying politically astute Catholicism. I welcome it. If nothing else, it means that Christians are taking politics (and public morality) seriously again. A robust debate...