Category: Politics
Public Education, Justice, and Solidarity
Firing up the ol’ blog machine (in no small part because the excellent Tara Isabella Burton has joined the Mere-O world) for a series of disjointed thoughts on this Atlantic piece about a family that tried to escape the insane...
exposing the wounds in the Church
I really wish this New Yorker profile of Karen Swallow Prior had been about three times as long, but it’ll have to do for now: The next morning, we shared a breakfast of scrambled eggs with some venison that Roy had...
whither conservatism?
While there’s a lot more that could be said and a lot of things that could be said differently (as I hope to in a forthcoming essay for Mere-O), I appreciated this assessment from Timothy Shenk at Dissent of where things are...
“legalizing marijuana won’t solve those disparities”
I found this interview with Alex Berenson, who just wrote a new book about the dangers of marijuana, very interesting and well-balanced: TMP: In your Times op-ed, you suggest that the ominous scholarly findings have been ignored thanks to legalization advocates...
what if there’s nothing to assimilate to?
Shadi Hamid continues to be indispensable in thinking through issues of identity, belief, and assimilation in America: In short, Muslims are becoming more integrated, but they are becoming more integrated within only one half of the country, the Democratic one....
why is Turkey buying a town in Sudan?
No posts planned for tomorrow- Merry Christmas! If you’re into Northeast African politics, you won’t want to miss this dispatch from Nanjala Nyabola: Suakin sits along Sudan’s Red Sea coast, a small grouping of faded buildings and historical ruins containing...
a letter from a Chinese pastor
This is a moving letter from a Chinese pastor arrested for preaching the Gospel: Those who lock me up will one day be locked up by angels. Those who interrogate me will finally be questioned and judged by Christ. When I...
culture is learning to be free
This is a fascinating interview with Patrick Deneen at the ever-worthwhile Comment magazine (subscribe now for $30/year!) Liberalism ends in slavery because its notion of freedom involves the pursuit of desires that can never be sated, that can never be fulfilled....
baby steps on criminal justice reform
Emma Green looks at the conservative Christian push for the First Step Act and the pushback from other Christian leaders wary of working with Trump on anything — and leaving the underlying issues unaddressed: Conservative religious leaders like Colson saw...
makes you wanna holler
This report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (an organization doing more than any other, I think, to highlight where and how people can be working for the localism we like to talk about) highlights how dollar stores deliver low-quality goods...