Category: Current Politics
Politics Is More Than Abortion vs Character
There has been a lot of Christian handwringing about American politics and the 2020 election. Al Mohler updated the same line of thought that has led to four decades of alliance between conservative, pro-life evangelicals with the Republican Party by...
Dogmatic Partisanship’s Dead End
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter,...
Reading “In Praise of Folly” in 2020
From across the political spectrum, it seems the one thing everyone can agree on right now is that we’ve lost the ability to speak to each other, much less persuade one another. Our seemingly irreconcilable differences about social and political...
A Catholic Judge in a Post-Liberal Age
Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court has once again raised the question of the role of Catholicism in American public life. Catholic judges are often in the position. But in interesting ways, she may represent...
This Gruesome Guest
Nihilism is at our door: whence comes this most gruesome of all guests to us? —Friedrich Nietzsche[1] If nihilism devalues even the highest of values, we can state with a fair amount of certainty that we are living in it...
J. Cole’s “For Your Eyez Only” Gives Hope for Change Beyond Elections
In my lessons on Christianity and social justice, I always feature clips from J. Cole’s 2017 HBO documentary For Your Eyez Only. The film, directed by Cole and Scott Lazer, features interviews with residents of small black cities throughout the...
Honor Thy Boomer
Boomers have had all the luck of cod in a cask in recent generational warfare. Lyman Stone declared at The Atlantic that “The Boomers Ruined Everything.” Joseph Sternberg accuses the Boomer bloc of The Theft of a Decade, stealing Millenials’...
All Monuments Must Fall
The Lincoln Memorial will not be in the New Jerusalem. Our civilization’s monuments, the testimonial pillars of our cultural identity, have been subjected to an increasingly strident moral audit. It has been observed to the point of banality that this...
Who’s Your Authority?: Notes on Ideology and Enemies
I don’t think it would be fair to blame my father for his distrust of authority. Growing up in 1960s Jim Crow Alabama, in a hardscrabble, blue-collar family that aspired for white-collar status, he didn’t have particularly good influences. He...
Can Justice Be Saved? Part Three: On Hope
In the previous two essays of this triptych, I have attempted to sketch how the Gospel of Jesus Christ might shape our understanding of justice in order to clarify what our responsibilities as Christians might be in our own time....