Category: Politics
it’s all about governance and trust
Shadi Hamid, Vanda Felbab-Brown, and Harold Trinkunas share an excerpt from their new book on governance and trust, a subject that I’ve been banging on about for quite a while now: The Taliban claims to adhere to a strict interpretation of...
why can’t white Christians take black Christians at their word?
I’ve seen this article on Christians of color slowly backing away from white churches shared over and over this past weekend (for good reason, though Amy Sullivan notes that very similar reporting was done a year ago at Religion Dispatches). The...
we can make up great things — like national identity!
Michael Brendan Dougherty has a bone to pick with people who want to sneer at “made-up” national identities: Nationalism as a political movement was also what made democracy possible; it helped to overthrow ancient monarchies that routinely bequeathed nations with...
can Black Lives Matter achieve its goals?
This is a fascinating essay from Cedric Johnson examining the history of the Black Panthers and comparing its political activism to the Black Lives Matter movement: The racial justice frame simply does not adequately explain the current crisis of police...
The Sacrifice of Africa — a book all missionaries to Africa should read
I’d been wanting to read The Sacrifice of Africa by Emmanuel Katongole (a Ugandan theologian and priest) for a while and finally found one in Nairobi. I would heartily commend this book to anyone who is interested in African politics...
preventing child deaths in America
America Magazine asked me to write a short piece about America’s shameful discrepancies in child deaths. It wasn’t easy to squeeze 3 very different causes of death into 750 words, but I did my best. It was interesting (for me,...
denying admission to Christian refugees
The U.S. recently denied asylum to about 100 Iranian Christians who had previously been invited to apply for refugee status, reports Mindy Belz at WORLD. Some, apparently, did not meet the security requirements. Sadly, while a lot of opposition to...
EMRs are designed for billing, not for retaining information
The dirty secret of all electronic medical records (EMRs) is this: they are not primarily designed to help doctors record, review, or share information about their patients. No, they are primarily designed to capture the data necessary to submit bills to...
science should be more political, not less
I just came upon Ari Schulman’s excellent essay in The Hedgehog Review about trying to make science less political: What we need is not a depoliticized science but a more political science—that is, a science unembarrassed about the legitimate role of politics in...
pro-life, anti-abortion, and a consistent ethic of anything
I’ve gotten a lot of responses to my post on the main site from the other day, specifically questioning the idea that “pro-life” ought to be circumscribed to mean only anti-abortion policies. My main points (which I would still consider...