Category: Politics
the paranoid style in American Christianity
We’re doomed! Doomed, I tell you: Take this seriously. We are like people on a beach, watching a tsunami build on the horizon. You know how tsunamis work, right? There’s an earthquake far out at sea, and the shock wave...
we need a twenty-first century Comstock
Helen Andrews is at The Hedgehog Review with a review of a book on Anthony Comstock and censorship, subtly calling for a new Comstock for our brave new world of pornography: The problem of pornography has never been worse than it...
“making human life safe for human beings”
This is a fine essay by James Poulos on the failure of “mass enlightenment” to occur via technology and the urge of the institutional elites to add more technology to fix the problem: On those premises, the internet arose. By...
love in a time of really nasty politics
I really appreciate everything that Judy Wu Dominick writes, and this reflection on “loving your political frenemies” is no exception: I still ache over the anguish of some and the bigotry of others, but this prayer discipline has chipped away...
where Foucault and the Apostle Paul meet
This interview with Alan Jacobs is full of all the things I love to think about! The new book has an “Interlude,” in which you point to “other pilgrims, other paths,” and one of the figures is Dorothy Day, an icon...
pluralism and hell
Shadi Hamid, who is one of the sharpest foreign policy commentators out there, has a really good interview in Providence magazine about Islam, liberalism, and pluralism: As for theological resources that conservatives might share across faiths, something I’ve been thinking about...
the wonderful world of zoning reform
Zoning reform, while decidedly unsexy, is probably one of the more important issues in America when it comes to reducing poverty. Housing is expensive and there’s no way to subsidize enough for everyone — we have to break down the...
immigration and identity
There are so many things to think about from this piece by Luma Simms in National Affairs: Throughout history, people have traveled from country to country, trading with one another over long distances, returning home with the goods, habits, and even...
“Nothing can take form except within limits.”
Wendell Berry summarizes many of our contemporary problems quite well in this excellent interview with Gracy Olmstead: Those problems could be summed up as the triumph of industrialism and industrial values over the lives of living creatures, and over the...
men not at work
Senator Mike Lee’s office has been doing fantastic work investigating America’s declining social capital, and this report on men out of the workforce has a lot to chew on: We confirm research by other scholars that a large number of...