Category: Current Politics

j-r-r-tolkien

Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Marriage Act and the Post-Boomer Church

Some time after his death, an editor was going through the papers and books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s library when he came across an old copy of C. S. Lewis’s pamphlet “Christian Behavior,” which would later be re-published as...

/ November 30, 2022

The Withering of Persuasion

What are any of us doing when we take up our avatars and handles to enter into fights on Facebook and Twitter? When we post links and frame them with incendiary remarks as though sharing the link was itself a...

/ November 29, 2022

Rich Christians in an Age of Competing Obligations

Christianity is a religion of seemingly impossible paradoxes, and the Christian life is a series of decisions made within a set of difficult, often excruciating tensions. The simplest paradoxes are the purely theological ones: Jesus is fully God and man;...

/ November 21, 2022

How Should Christians Speak in Public?

Watching David Koch skewer evangelical pastor Guy Mason on Australia’s morning show Sunrise was an excruciating experience.[1] Andrew Thorburn had been dismissed for his association with the City on a Hill church just a couple of days after being appointed...

/ November 10, 2022
washington-political-engagement

The Case for Voting Third Party

These days, it’s hard to be a Christian who cares about politics—and public ethics, character, and the mission of God. On the one hand, our political system is a mess, with platforms pushing toward the extremes, and constituencies nursing rising...

/ November 7, 2022

Fight Progressivism. Be Liberal.

In 2017 and 2018, Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argued that classical liberalism and progressivism are indistinguishable. Pick your metaphor: Progressivism is the fruit of liberalism’s poisoned tree. The liberal seed led inexorably to the progressive flowering. Or, liberalism...

/ November 3, 2022

Negative World Arrives in Australia

It didn’t take long, but we can now say that Aaron Renn and James Wood have been vindicated. Their recent analyses of our cultural moment and strategies for Christian cultural engagement have been proven right by recent events in Australia....

/ November 3, 2022

Biblical Nationalism

Several months after the shocking naval victory at Salamis in the fall of 480 BC and Xerxes’ hasty retreat to Asia with his navy, a delegation arrived in Athens. Leading this embassy was Alexander I of Macedon, a longtime friend...

/ November 2, 2022

John Quincy Adams: Christian Nationalist?

In the February of 1824, politically active Calvinists across the northern United States finally got their wish for a godly devout president who made the American republic a more explicitly Christian and righteous nation. The House of Representatives chose John...

/ October 26, 2022

Resistance and Rebellion

(Excerpted from Protestant Social Teaching published by the Davenant Institute. Used with permission.) As the Reformation took hold throughout Europe, much ink and blood was spilt over the question of what is right to do when the government is wrong....

/ October 17, 2022