Category: Politics
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...
The Dust Bowl, Remembered
In clean, cool air the morning after a thunderstorm, while blazing pink and golden light spills over the horizon before becoming a deep cerulean crown over a sweltering summer afternoon, it is difficult to imagine the conditions in Texas only...
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....
Can Justice Be Saved? Part Two: On Charity
It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon in the Anderson household a few years back, full of books and tea and other comforts. My wife had momentarily interrupted my reading by giving me a kiss, seemingly without cause. It captured just...
Steelmanning the “Fill the Seat” Debate
The best argument for holding Justice Ginsburg’s SCOTUS seat until after the presidential inauguration comes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech in which he assailed America’s tendency toward “legalism.” By “legalism” Solzhenitsyn meant a characteristically American tendency to think that as...
Can Justice Be Saved? Part One: On Faith
Christians can't embrace all aspects of contemporary ideas of social justice. But we must also recognize that what came before was similarly dangerous.
The Insignificance of Voting
“. . . [F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived...
For the Life of the World: Spiritual Formation and Public Life
Adaptation from Liturgy of Politics by Kaitlyn Schiess Political Responsibility Our political participation is both creational and anticipatory. Humans were commanded from the beginning to bear the image of God in our creative work and rule, and our earthly work...
Conservatism, Out of Decadence
In a review of Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society, Tara Isabella Burton argued that the way out of decadence is to have actual public conversation and debate about how our politics can be reconnected to something transcendent or, at...
The Strange Death of the Populist Dream and the Victory of Woke Integralism
“Religious insanity is very common in the United States.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Between the Coronavirus pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the incredible wave of civil unrest and protest that followed in its wake, descending...