During the upcoming year, I will be researching the authoritarian and totalitarian impulses that exist in Western societies. In November, I read Hannah Arendt’s reflections on how to spot and resist totalitarian movements and Augusto Del Noce’s The Age of Secularization and The Crisis of Modernity, which argue that scientism and eroticism have combined to create a [ Read More ]
The last twenty years in American life has seen the rise of libertarianism as a force to be reckoned with in American politics, especially within the Republican Party. Libertarianism is a view that places an extraordinary emphasis on liberty—as it defines liberty—and orders society in a particular manner in order to achieve that liberty. [Note: [ Read More ]
During the upcoming year, I intend to study the authoritarian and totalitarian impulses that exist among portions of the Left and the Right in Western liberal democracies. I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book, Polish political philosopher Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. I’ll also read Italian political philosopher Augusto [ Read More ]
It’s an age-old question, made more relevant by the insistence of media outlets and political pundits: Should pastors directly address contemporary political issues? Some commentators argue that Christianity offers a moral framework that is directly relevant to policy issues and thus the pastor should speak to politics. At other times the argument is made that [ Read More ]
Politics in the United States has, for some time, assumed a binary structure. On one side stand the Republicans, many of hold to some form of social conservatism. On the other side stand the Democrats, many of whom hold to some form of social progressivism. But what many Americans fail to see is that conservatism [ Read More ]
A left-wing political cartoonist is facing criticism, and rightly so, for mocking Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s 10-year-old-daughter, Liza, in a cartoon published this past weekend. The cartoonist, Chris Britt, depicted the girl praying, “Dear God, please forgive my angry, lying, alcoholic father for sexually assaulting Dr. [Christine] Ford.” The context of the illustration is [ Read More ]
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 ]
“Daddy, where is God during the hurricane?” This is the question my five-year-old son asked me yesterday. We were huddled together on the porch with my wife Lauren and our two daughters, watching the pine trees in our back yard being whipped around by the wind. It’s a good question. If God is as good [ Read More ]
Last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) introduced the Economic Security for New Parents Act, a fiscally-responsible paid-parental-leave plan that is good not only for working-class families but for the nation as a whole. In the Rubio bill, parents of newborn babies or newly-adopted children are given the option of drawing upon Social Security to take [ Read More ]
Recently, I posted articles examining the rise and development of political liberalism and socialism in the United States, arguing that the former ideology makes an idol out of “individual autonomy” while the latter ideology makes an idol of “material equality.” In this article, we will examine the idolatrous nature of political nationalism. Before delving into [ Read More ]