Category: Political Theory
Dr. Moore and the Politics of Dinner Parties
On Monday night I got on the E train in Forest Hills and headed to the Union League Club on East 37th Street to hear Russell Moore, President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the...
Betraying Politics: The Mystique of Public Life
“Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique,” observes French essayist Charles Péguy. In other words, that which begins as a pure idea—mystic, even transcendent—devolves into profane politics, the slow grind of policy divorced from any sort of...
Hamilton, Meritocracy, and Patriotism
I held out for as long as I could. My resistance was sustained chiefly by a stubborn contrarianism that resists as many trends as possible, particularly those that can be credibly connected to New York City, Washington, San Francisco, or Los...
Why Christians Can Support Tighter Immigration Restrictions
Today we have another long-form piece, this one coming from Stephen Wolfe. I’m pleased to run this piece chiefly because Stephen does a good job of trying to focus the debate around the specific principles that undergird our thinking about an...
The Politics of Tolkien
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone George RR Martin had this to say about the differences between his work and that of JRR Tolkien. “A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across...
Conscience and Conservatives: What role should it play in public debate?
We’ve all been whipped into a frenzy over Rush Limbaugh’s idiotic insults of a Georgetown law student, a controversy I have been fastidiously trying to ignore. Errors often compound faster than interest, and responding to one outlandish statement with apoplexy...
The Rachel Held Evans Conversation: Why I am a Conservative
Rachel Held Evans’ readers ask all kinds of hard questions. As in really hard questions. There’s are thoughts on several topics there that may be unfamiliar to Mere-O readers, as the Iraq War comes up, the meaning of “pro-life” gets...
Mere-O @ Acton U
I’m currently in Grand Rapids, Michigan attending the Acton Institute’s “Acton University”—an annual four-day conference focused, broadly, around two topics: Religion and Liberty. Acton is often pegged as a free-market think-tank, but after two days of discussion, it is evident...
Political Correctness…, I mean Religious Correctness
[This post is lengthy; be forewarned] As I expected would happen, the readers of Mere-O have responded both with class, sensitivity, and elegance to my original post, in which I provoked conversation about the Mosque Controversy in New York City....
Arguing with George William Curtis
I’d never heard of George William Curtis before this past Saturday. A quote of his popped up on my friend’s facebook wall, in what I assume to be a strange way of pepping himself up for the US/Ghana World Cup...