Category: Current Politics
The Land is Bright
And not through eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, — how slowly! But westward — look! the land is bright. ~ A. H. Clough And so Roe is overthrown. Some...
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...
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...
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....
Borderless
There is great concern in the church today about individualism. From Carl Trueman’s work on expressive individualism to other works revealing its deficiencies and threats to Christian spirituality, ours is believed to be an age of individualism. These critiques are...
Masks, Mercy, and Measure for Measure
Masks have made the slippery concept of “virtue-signaling” oddly literal. The virtues of care and the safety of others or freedom and individual liberty now can be visibly signaled simply by wearing or abstaining from a mask. Mundane tasks like...
Visions of Exile: Christian Communitarianism, Christian Secularism, and Faithful Presence
How can Christians live faithfully in an ever-changing and increasingly pluralistic world? How can we maintain that faithfulness, both over the course of our own lives and from generation to generation? What sort of formation do we and our children...
The Virtues We Need to Repair Trust
As residents of Washington, D.C., we had a front row seat to the events of January 6, 2021 as they unfolded in our neighborhood streets. Glued to our couches and phone screens, we heard the sirens blare down streets to...