In Response to Sumpter on Ethnicity and Polity
Toby Sumpter has written a thoughtful response to my Theopolis piece on Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism. I wanted to delay responding till post-Christmas (YES, I KNOW, it is still Christmas till Epiphany, calm down) to avoid generating Discourse, which...
Danger and Play and Proverbs 31
There’s been, I’m sorry to say, Discourse. So I figured I’d make things a little worse by highlighting an aspect of a thing that I wrote a couple years back for the Calvinist International (may it rise again). What do...
From Whom All Fatherhood On Earth Takes Its Name
Τούτου χάριν κάμπτω τὰ γόνατά μου πρὸς τὸν Πατέρα, τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ, ἐξ οὗ πᾶσα πατριὰ ἐν οὐρανοῖς καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς ὀνομάζεται… Here, in Ephesians, Paul talks about the Patera, the Father, from whom pasa patria, all fatherhood/every...
Cultural Conversion, Thirteenth Century England Style; or, James Davison Hunter Vindicated by Sir Maurice Powicke
Norman Cantor (bitter, brilliant, blinkered; he was wrong about Lewis and so I don’t necessarily trust him to be right about others) writes that according to Sir Maurice Powicke, the key transformations of the thirteenth century “were not political and...
On History Not Ending
It’s a cute and annoying title because of course it’s a reference to Fukuyama, but I didn’t even realize that until I typed it. What I was referring to is what has been haunting me (and probably you) for the...
Scott Alexander, the Hitpiece, and the Limits of Inquiry
In certain moods I think that one of the greatest current social fights is the fight against the Grey Tribe ascendency, against the let’s-regard-humans-and-society-as-an-amoral-optimization-experiment approach to life. There are certain versions of this that are at the center of the...
The Time is Near
I’ve never written about this before, but today is the first Sunday of Advent, and it’s also both C.S. Lewis’ and Madeleine L’Engle’s birthday, and so I am going to try to describe something – at least to start. I...
American Solidarity Party: Don’t Throw Away Your Shot
Why not vote for a candidate you can actually support? Brian Carroll and Amar Patel, the American Solidarity Party ticket, are on the ballot in eight states; you can write them in in all other states. They’re a party that...
Attention: a Breaking Ground Newsletter
This is the text of this week’s Breaking Ground newsletter. To view the website, and to sign up for the newsletter, go here. If, in January, we thought that we had transcended the limits of our physicality, we know better...
TONIGHT: 7:30 EDT: Hauerwas, Danticat, Christman, and a New Cocktail!
Good afternoon! Tonight, join Stanley Hauerwas, Edwidge Danticat, and Phil Christman for the launch of Plough Quarterly’s special “Regeneration” issue, focusing on COVID and what lies ahead. Hosted by KGB Red Room on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, this event is...