Category: Current Politics
Unions are Dead; Long Live Unions
Oren Cass’s book The Once and Future Worker is among the most important in living memory on the subject of labor from the conservative perspective. He instinctively gets that there is a pre-economic political relationship in which all economic activity...
To Consume
My friend Shane Morris whipped up rather a remarkable storm recently on Twitter with this: Millennials who are very cavalier about not having children are in for a shock when they enter their 40s & realize life is only half...
Rules for Winsomeness
At root, the kerfuffle sparked by James Wood’s summer essay(s) on winsomeness revolves around the question of what makes for an effective Christian witness in America’s current sociocultural moment. For many, this question raises additional issues for how Christians should...
Kichijiro Was Right
You’ve probably heard this one before: a masked gunman bursts into church one day and fires a few rounds into the ceiling. “Everyone who believes in Jesus is getting shot today! Everyone who wants to deny Him can leave!” He...
A Puritan Founding?
Earlier this year Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry published The Flag + the Cross, a sociological expose on what they identified as the threat to American democracy from what they called white Christian nationalism. It’s a work of sociology more...
Unpacking “Realism”
There is a fascinating ambivalence regarding the term “realism.” On the one hand, many claim to be realists since the alternative would be to be, well, unrealistic. Political realism built its modern brand during the interwar period as the sensible...
The Uselessness of “Christian Nationalism”
Over the past several years the topic of Christian nationalism has occupied the minds of Evangelical intellectuals and pastors. No less than half a dozen books have been written on the subject in the past year. Three of them have...
Shame
Shame is, amongst other things, the problem of how to understand yourself and your relationship to neighbor in the aftermath of offending or hurting your neighbor. Given the fragmentation of our society, we shouldn’t be surprised that no one seems...
Orbanism and the Revolution
One of the chief difficulties about the conversation between the Augustinian Liberal Christian Right and the Reactionary Christian Right to this point has been a lack of clarity about the actual political principles and norms that reactionary conservative evangelicals affirm.
The Triviality of Pro-Choice Memes
Last week SCOTUS handed down its decision in the Dobbs case and changed the course of American legal, moral, and, well, general history, by striking down Roe v. Wade, ending the nation-wide regime of abortion-on-demand across virtually all nine months...