A few things online that caught my attention this week: Do professors have “tech paranoia?“ The end of Fort Lee. A Protestant cemetery in Rome. The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading. The death of […]
Archives for April 2023
Historian Linda Kerber revisits Women of the Republic
Last week in my American Revolution course we debated how the revolution influenced the lives of women. In the course of our discussion I introduced the students to Linda Kerber‘s idea of “republican motherhood.” This didn’t take too much pedagogical […]
The Christian postal worker case in historical context
Gerald Graff works for the U.S. postal service. He is also an evangelical who honors the Christian sabbath. In other words, he won’t deliver the mail on Sundays. His religious convictions cost him his job. The Supreme Court recently heard […]
What is popular this week at Current?
Here are the most popular features of the week at Current: Here are the most popular posts of the last week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home blog: Here are the most popular posts of the last week at The Arena blog:
The Politics of MAGA
Nostalgia makes a terrible foundation for a political movement
What I am reading: Faith, hope, and love in Eugene Vodolazkin’s Brisbane
Over the course of these first four months of Anno Domini 2023, I have read through all of the novels of the Russian writer Eugene Vodolazkin. This was not planned, but this is the sort of thing that is bound […]
Commonplace Book #264
The liberal method of taking part in the political contest cannot be qualified; it is not and cannot be either bourgeois or socialist, conservative or revolutionary, though its very nature tends to make it favor the forces of progress. As […]
Hidden holiness
Is “hidden holiness” the answer to celebrity culture? Here is Andy Stanton-Henry at Plough: There’s another word for “successful saints”: celebrities. There has been a lot of conversation lately about the dangers of celebrity Christianity, and I don’t want to […]
A socialist magazine on “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism”
Conservatives, including Turning Point USA pundit Charlie Kirk, like to scare people with threats of “cultural Marxism.” Here is Nick French at Jacobin: The American right’s long and venerable tradition of red-baiting has always involved branding any kind of efforts at progressive […]
“Good [humanities] teaching matters, but it can’t be measured”
Here is a taste of Johann Neem’s review of Gayle Greene’s Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of Algorithm: These are tough times for humanities professors. Flip through The Chronicle and the disillusionment jumps off the page. Post-pandemic students are disengaged. Colleges […]
Historian Barbara Fields on the 1619 Project
Here is the Columbia University historian on how to think historically about 17th-century Virginia:
Commonplace Book #264
All the signs are that the first disciples really did believe that Jesus was bodily alive again–albeit in a new body which seemed to possess properties for which they were quite unprepared–and that easily the best explanation for this is […]
President of South Korea sings “American Pie”
Here is South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol performing the Don McClean classic last night in the White House:
Evangelical roundup for April 27, 2023
What is happening in Evangelical land? Eighteen Christian colleges have closed since COVID-19. Charles Stanley’s last words to his son Andy. Evangelicals and guns. 1968: Young Life defends human dignity. Methodist congregations are leaving the United Methodist Church in droves: […]
Am I the Last of My Kind?
Fighting for the communities we love—despite the odds
Evangelicals didn’t always champion gun rights – and mainline Protestants didn’t always oppose guns
Today there’s a stark difference between white evangelicals’ attitudes toward guns and the attitudes of mainline Protestants and adherents of other branches of Christianity. While several mainline Protestant denominations are now strong advocates of gun control, white evangelicals are more […]
Commonplace Book #263
Liberty can never be won through tyranny or dictatorship, or even through being granted from above. Liberty is a conquest, a self-conquest, which is preserved only through the continual exercise of one’s faculties and individual autonomies. For liberalism, and hence […]
What William F. Buckley thought about Dorothy Day’s Catholicism
Here is a taste of David Mills’s column at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: In 1960, the leader of American conservatism treated a leading radical, and as it happened fellow Catholic, like an idiot. The first, who died in 2008, is now […]
The Author’s Corner with Kevin Kenny
Kevin Kenny is Professor of History and Glucksman Professor in Irish Studies at New York University. This interview is based on his new book, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford […]
Coverage of AI and technology-gone-rogue at Current, Arena, and Way of Improvement
A wise reader, Stephen Kamm, remarked earlier this week after reading Elizabeth Stice’s essay this Monday: “A thoughtful piece, and we need many thoughtful pieces on this topic. I’ve adopted the “shut my eyes and pretend it doesn’t exist” approach […]