Category: Religion
conservative Christian single payer health care: critiques & responses
First Things was gracious enough to publish my brief argument for single-payer health care from a conservative, Christian perspective. There was a lot that had to be cut due to space and a lot that I didn’t write simply because...
“Look at this ear I cut off, Lord!”
“Look at this ear I cut off, Lord! Isn’t it so bloody and ragged?” “Did you cut that off of… Philip’s head?” “Well, yeah, but did you hear what he said about…” I’m trying to stop sneering. My own tendencies...
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...
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...
looking for better mind-readers
There is a strain of commentary that has been more or less constant for the past decade or so, and its thesis is basically thus: A certain group of Christians, by virtue of their cultural position, are embarrassed by the...
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...
an alternative ethic
In the current context, where everyone is talking about the world as a global village, it is important to undertake an exploration into the particularities of the indigenous world view of Africa. We wish to sample them because they have...
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...