Category: Politics
Who’s Going to Clean the Toilets in Your Utopia? Anna Neima’s The Utopians
Anna Neima. The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society. London: Picador, 2021. 320pp, $39.95. “I saw a horse collapse in the street: the driver was knocked aside by the starving people, who rushed to cut chunks from the...
Calvinism and Liberty
If you had to summarize Calvin’s teaching on resisting tyrants it would be: don’t. Even as his Protestant compatriots, the Huguenots, faced persecution and he fled France to Geneva, Calvin was firmly on the side of maintaining political order. He...
Hobbits and Empire: Geography and the Life of Nations in Tolkien’s Writings
As we journey through J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth, we find a remarkable variety of distinctive landscapes, from the rural towns of the Shire, to the abandoned halls of Moria, the Elvish tree-city of Lothlórien, the Forest of Drúadan, the...
Marilynne Robinson Imagines the Soul of America
Living there, you’ll be free, if you truly wish to be.” ~Gene Wilder, Pure Imagination The frigid breeze gusting through downtown Des Moines, Iowa, did little to help the Democratic Nominee for President, Joe Biden, as he struggled to project...
On Healing: Learning from Separatists
The idea of a black nation seems so far-fetched as to be ludicrous, but if you entertain it for a minute, even as an impossible dream, it should give you a feeling of wholeness and belonging you’ve never had and...
Friendship Through a Pandemic: Seeing More Clearly With Stanley Hauerwas
Ephraim Radner and others have recently reflected that the church’s theologians have said shockingly little about the pandemic that’s really been helpful, that’s helped Christians think clearly about this global crisis. To get our heads straight, minds clear, and hearts...
An Orthodox Theory of Brainworms
Commentators have been calling political extremism a form of religion for a long time. Discussions of the United States’s current political hysteria often describe it as similar to Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, or through Western heuristics. It is...
Christians in the Gray Zone: The Strong Gods are Back
In his 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, the great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that what united the capitalist west and communist east mattered more than what divided them. Both, he said, had lost any feel for the transcendent,...
Black Patriotism and National Conservatism
I watched Glenn Loury’s address at the second National Conservatism conference around the time of the event with great interest. Since then, I’ve also seen the print version of it in First Things. You can view the video of the...
The Culture War Comes Home
The culture war arrived in my hometown a few weeks ago with the approval of a new fairness ordinance by the Lincoln City Council. The ordinance is designed to provide protections against harassment and discrimination for LGBT+ people in Lincoln....