Apparently God saved Trump to deport immigrants, fire federal employees without notice, start a trade war, cut aid to suffering people around the world, and bow to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. Let’s see what evangelicals are saying about Trump’s speech […]
Archives for March 2025
Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Chapter 11)
Republican Revolution
Mike Pence is teaching at Grove City College
I was at the western Pennsylvania college a couple weeks ago and I didn’t see the former vice-president. But as Jim Martin reports at the Erie Times-News, Pence is teaching at Grove City College, a school that calls itself a […]
LONG FORM: Jackson, Trump and Constitutional Crisis
Itâs an old but timely question: âWhat sort of hope have we?â
Song of the night
“Rubio is privately frustrated that Trump has effectively sidelined him.”
Trouble in Trump land? Here is Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair: Even as it was happening on Friday, the Oval Office blowup between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was being cast as one of Americaâs darkest moments on the […]
Walter Lippman worried about a time when people âcease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinionsâwhat somebody asserts, not what actually is.â
Check out Jeannette Cooperman’s essay at Common Reader on the late white-suited writer Tom Wolfe. She has some interesting thoughts on the so-called “New Journalism” of the 1960s and 1970s. A taste: Did Wolfe do such a good job capturing […]
More people will suffer and die in Ukraine because Trump needs his ego stroked
In case you missed it last night, the United States stopped military aid to Ukraine. This is what happens in Trump world when you don’t kiss the president’s ring. More people will die this week in Ukraine because Trump believes […]
Mike Pence calls Pope Francis “Holy Father” and all hell breaks lose in the conservative evangelical world
File this post under the “Anti-Catholicism is alive and well” category. Here is Pence’s tweet: This guy is questioning Pence’s Christianity: Not an evangelical?: And the hits keep coming: Jon Root invokes R.C. Sproul:
Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Chapter 10)
Research, Writing, Editing, Uniting?
REVIEW: Storylife
Homer for our time
David Brooks on the Trump-Zelenskyy Oval Office exchange: “I was nauseated”
Watch:
“No one is going to pay you to do things that can be done as easily as having AI write your essays for you. How are you going to acquire skills that may actually be valuable?”
Jim Cullen, a history teacher at Greenwich County Day School and a Current contributing editor, talks to his class: Weâre in my âMoney and Moralsâ elective, where weâve been reading Hernan Diazâs Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2022 novel Trust, a fun-house mirror of postmodernism […]
A new Gilded Age?
Are the robber barons back? Here is Politico historian Joshua Zeitz: At his second inauguration, as President Donald Trump promised to usher America into a new âgolden age,â he was surrounded in the Capitol Rotunda by a handful of tech […]
Alumni magazines are on the rise
We receive eight different alumni magazines in our household. I read all of them. I am always looking for good stories and great writing. According to a recent piece at Inside Higher Ed, colleges and universities throughout the country are […]
What is DEI anyway?
Here is Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic: On President Donald Trumpâs first day back in the White House, he issued an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government. Its sweeping language forbids DEI âmandates, policies, programs, preferences, […]
Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Chapter 9)
Good Times in Texas
History saves us from ourselves
My piece in yesterday’s Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. A taste: Today the study of history is used as a cudgel in the culture wars. Activists on both the left and the right cherry-pick from the past to […]
The Craftsman
Mr. Yokohata follows the rhythms of his artistry
Sunday night odds and ends
A few things online that caught my attention this week: Was Francis Fukuyama right about liberal democracy and the “end of history”? Tom Nichols on that Trump-Zelinskyy Oval Office meeting. Jonathan Chait here. Yoni Appelbaum on the Puritan origins of […]