The Boss has canceled all of his remaining 2023 shows. (He originally just canceled September shows). He continues to battle peptic ulcer disease. Here is Melina Newman at Billboard: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band have pulled their remaining 2023 […]
Archives for 2023
Evangelical roundup for September 28, 2023
What is happening in Evangelical land? The National Association of Evangelicals has launched a “racial justice Assessment tool.” Syrian evangelicals on the ground in Turkey. The 50th anniversary of the Lausanne Covenant. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary hosts a conference […]
Donald Duck and the GOP
At times I thought last night’s debate was taking place in an alternate GOP universe
Review: Why we still need Jonathan Edwards
American Christians today may be in danger of venerating Jonathan Edwards either too much or too little
Commonplace Book #285
The miners retain many of their admirable qualities today, but it is evident that their world, the world of early industrialism, is dying–and the union, seeking to survive by allying itself to management and mechanization, itself becomes an enemy. It […]
The Christian faith of UAW’s Shawn Fain
He carries a Bible and regularly invokes his faith as he leads the United Auto Workers in a historic strike against the country’s three largest automakers. For Fain, the strike is a “righteous cause.” This reminds of Eugene Debs’s claim […]
Every candidate on the stage at tonight’s GOP debate should go after Trump
Tonight is the second presidential primary debate. Donald Trump will not be there. He really doesn’t have to be there. He has a massive lead in the polls. Why would any political adviser suggest that the former president attend this […]
Conquering the wilderness, building a city on a hill, and tonight’s GOP debate
Historian Peter Mancall will be looking for references to the Puritans in tonight’s GOP presidential primary debate. He found several in the first debate. Here is a taste of his piece at Zocalo Public Square: The second Republican debate will […]
Dying a Good Death, Living a Good Life
Dorothy Sayers and the redemptive power of the detective genre
Why did Jonathan Edwards think that slavery was morally right?
A note from the editor: This essay is reposted from the Anxious Bench, where it ran on 09/26/2023. It is much longer than anything else that has ever run on this blog — at nearly 7,000 words, it is the […]
Brooks Robinson, RIP
RIP:
Joe Biden joins the United Auto Workers picket line in support of striking workers
For the first time in United States history a sitting president joined a picket line. Here is Joe Biden at a General Motors warehouse in Van Buren Township, Michigan: More here. Interesting take from a Cambridge University historian: Socialist Jacobin […]
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”: A short history
Over at Black Perspectives, historian Nico Slate reflects on the history of this famous phrase with a short analysis that spans from Theodore Parker to Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama and beyond. Here is a taste of his […]
Who will be on the GOP debate stage tomorrow night?
The second GOP presidential primary debate on Wednesday night will include Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tim Scott. Donald Trump will not attend. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson did not make the […]
Ralph Nader will support Biden in 2024
The goal is to keep Donald Trump as far away from the White House as possible. Here is Michael Scherer at The Washington Post: The liberal activist Ralph Nader still remembers nearly the exact words Joe Biden used to banish […]
Is “girl boss feminism” on the decline?
Here is Liza Featherstone at Jacobin: This elitist vision of feminism has been around for more than one hundred years. In the early twentieth century Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian socialist organizer and writer who would later become the only woman in […]
“Don’t let right-wing culture warriors obscure the fact that some ideas behind this progressive ideology have genuine problems.”
Last week we called your attention to Yascha Mounk’s new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Today we want to call your attention to a Mounk piece at The Atlantic based on the […]
Commonplace Book #284
The Social Gospel softened the impact of industrialism and brightened the lives of many men, and the policies it recommended still have merit. It did, however, strengthen that tendency of American thought that identified fraternity simply with solidarity. By adding […]
In defense of academic book reviews
Here is historian Carolyn Eastman, the book review editor at the William and Mary Quarterly, at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Reviews can contain perfunctory writing, boring chapter-by-chapter summaries, and criticism so mild it’s almost imperceptible. But having just stepped […]
Are public intellectuals condescending?
Becca Rothfield writes: “If the academic humanities too often address only siloed experts, then pop philosophy too often addresses an audience of imagined idiots. And condescension is an especially risky vice for public intellectuals, because it conflicts with the very […]