Tag "Philip Rieff"

Meeting God as an American

Many Americans experience this country’s social, cultural, and political scene as an unremitting dumpster fire. Our society is torn between competing visions of the good life. Our cultural institutions are increasingly dysfunctional and unable to inspire confidence. As a result, many find it easy to lose hope in the American experiment. To read the rest [ Read More ]

Expressive Individualism: Our Twenty-First Century American Ba’al

During the middle of the twentieth century, the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that the Western world was a “world come of age,” by which he did not intend a compliment; he meant that Westerners had learned to manage life without reference to God and that life without God is deeply unhealthy for individuals [ Read More ]

Christian Witness from the Cultural Margins

In the last century, our social order has been radically desacralized. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer described this as a “world come of age,” in which Westerners attempt to manage life without God. Sociologist Philip Rieff deemed this a third era in world history, an age in which social order has been severed from sacred order and in which the West’s [ Read More ]

Jordan Peterson: High Priest for a Secular Age

An article in The Spectator recently described Jordan Peterson as “one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years”—and they have a point. Peterson went from being virtually unknown in 2012 to perhaps the most famous public intellectual in the world in 2018. He has more than 2 million followers on YouTube and [ Read More ]

Christian Politics in a Secular Age

Recently, The Commonweal Project invited me to speak on “Christian Politics in a Secular Age” at their conference in Atlanta, GA. As it turned out, C-SPAN showed up to televise the talk and subsequent Q&A session. The televised talk is divided into roughly five segments: An introductory segment in which I draw upon sociologist Philip Rieff [ Read More ]