Category: Current Politics
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...
Moral Values and the Intercultural Development Inventory
In a previous article, I wrote about my concern with Christian organizations employing the Intercultural Development Inventory for two reasons, the undermining of the image of God and the undermining of objective moral values.
An Evaluation of Religious Exemptions from COVID-19 Vaccine Requirements
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many deaths and much suffering. It has also created a number of acute challenges for churches, one of which is how to think about religious exemptions to vaccine requirements. These requirements are sometimes imposed by...
The Cost of Nurture
Christians and even some non-Christian philosophers regularly strive to ‘remember death,’ but few of us seem willing to remember our birth. Only a few paragraphs into Augustine’s Confessions, he recalls the grace of God given to him by his own...
The End of the Liberalism Debate
We now seem to be at the end of a debate that has roiled the American Right for the past several years, or so says Sohrab Ahmari, one of the chief figures in that debate. But before we get to...
Public Health After Christendom
How are we to consider public health when the health of the public officials themselves would not be recognizable to prior generations? Are we to simply stick our heads in the sand pretending that everything is normal? The CDC has...
The Prophet of Re-Alignment: Reading Michael Lind in the Ruins of the Old Republic
It has become a tired cliché to lament the polarization of American politics, yet after a year that witnessed a post-election assault on the US Capitol, and in which even epidemiology became a partisan issue, few would contest the truth...
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...