Category: Politics
Christian Moral Pedagogy and Penumbrae of Power
I think most Christians these days who are thinking about culture, society, and politics agree with Leslie Newbigin that Christians in the West today face the challenge of being missionaries in their own culture, and that the post-Christian pluralist West...
four theses on immigration
The following are some core points about immigration that I hope can cut through the rhetoric that both sides of the issue tend to elide. The solutions I have on offer are not easy, nor do I expect they can...
The Right Thing Has a Real Cost: Abortion Politics and Social Welfare
This essay was originally published in 2015 at Canon and Culture, a project of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission under the title “The Right Thing Has a Real Cost”. I was unable to find it on Wayback Machine. I...
the liberal order and its haters
I’ve had several conversations in the past year in person and online in which I referenced “the liberal order” or “liberalism” as me and some of my buddies understand it, only to find that I have engendered confusion with this...
patriotism good, nationalism bad?
There is a recurrent discourse about nationalism and patriotism that I generally find stultifying. In general, many have (following C.S. Lewis) declared that patriotism is a good love of one’s country and people, while nationalism is the bad belief that...
things that can be true at the same time
I’ve made these points at greater length in other essays, but I can’t seem to get people who disagree to push back in a meaningful way. So I’m trying a different strategy, for the skeptics who seem to think that...
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...