Category: Politics
Friendship Through a Pandemic: Seeing More Clearly With Stanley Hauerwas
Ephraim Radner and others have recently reflected that the church’s theologians have said shockingly little about the pandemic that’s really been helpful, that’s helped Christians think clearly about this global crisis. To get our heads straight, minds clear, and hearts...
An Orthodox Theory of Brainworms
Commentators have been calling political extremism a form of religion for a long time. Discussions of the United States’s current political hysteria often describe it as similar to Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, or through Western heuristics. It is...
Christians in the Gray Zone: The Strong Gods are Back
In his 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, the great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that what united the capitalist west and communist east mattered more than what divided them. Both, he said, had lost any feel for the transcendent,...
Black Patriotism and National Conservatism
I watched Glenn Loury’s address at the second National Conservatism conference around the time of the event with great interest. Since then, I’ve also seen the print version of it in First Things. You can view the video of the...
The Culture War Comes Home
The culture war arrived in my hometown a few weeks ago with the approval of a new fairness ordinance by the Lincoln City Council. The ordinance is designed to provide protections against harassment and discrimination for LGBT+ people in Lincoln....
The Axis of Evil Turns 20: Reflections on the State of the Union
Given the state of the world, I expect that the president’s speech tonight will garner more viewers than it normally would. To the average viewer, the president’s State of the Union address can come across as a drawn out pep...
Borderless
There is great concern in the church today about individualism. From Carl Trueman’s work on expressive individualism to other works revealing its deficiencies and threats to Christian spirituality, ours is believed to be an age of individualism. These critiques are...
Masks, Mercy, and Measure for Measure
Masks have made the slippery concept of “virtue-signaling” oddly literal. The virtues of care and the safety of others or freedom and individual liberty now can be visibly signaled simply by wearing or abstaining from a mask. Mundane tasks like...
A Baptist Third Way for Political Theology
Author’s note: The following article is the first half of a chapter I have contributed to a book tentatively titled Explorations in Baptist Political Theology, edited by Thomas Kidd, Paul Miller, and Andrew Walker, to be published by B&H Academic...
Puritans and Theonomy, Reconsidered
Joseph Boot, The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society, 2nd ed. (2014; Toronto: Ezra Press, 2016), 978-0-9947279-0-9, 683 pages. Many Christians do not have a worked out political theology. We are aware of the importance of being...