Category: Current Politics
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...
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...
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...
Critical Theory as Method, Metanarrative, and Mood
In a recent article in First Things, “Evangelicals and Race Theory,” Carl Trueman enters into an increasingly contentious intramural debate amongst American evangelicals about the place of Critical Race Theory (and Critical Theory more broadly) in the life of the...
Covid-19, One Year On, Pt II: The Limits of Politics
One year ago today, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US passed 85,000, surpassing China where the virus had begun, and giving us the unenviable distinction of being #1 in the world. Today, America still holds that...
Explainer: Three Strategies for Family Policy Reform
Pity the poor tax code. Its drab cells and spreadsheets can’t bear the amount of moral weight we bring to bear on it. Whether, or how, to provide benefits to parents immediately raises all sorts of questions about the dignity...
Senator Rubio’s Work
To this day one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had was a retail gig I had for about a year after college. It was at a small neighborhood liquor store owned by a family that’d been in the neighborhood...
Called to Judgment: A Critical Review of “Fratelli Tutti”
Like a prophetic denunciation from the days of ancient Israel, the Covid-19 pandemic has come upon our self-absorbed and decadent civilization like a bolt from the blue, throwing into sharp relief the follies and fault-lines in our moral thinking and...