Category: Politics
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...
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 Two: 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...