Kissinger believed in only two things: power and stability. In his view, they were both intertwined.
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The philosophical assumptions behind historical criticism of the Gospels
This piece is re-posted from the Anxious Bench, where it ran on 11/28/2023. Twenty-one percent of white mainline Protestants do not believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, a Pew research survey found. By contrast, only 1 percent of white evangelical...
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Rosalynn Carter’s political partnership
Rosalynn Carter modeled a rare third option: a joint political partnership in which her public service and policy work would be inseparably linked with her husband’s.
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What If AI Had Written the Gettysburg Address?
Lincoln anticipated what AI cannot: the need for a new path
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Pro-lifers’ needless defeat in Ohio shows the dangers of refusing to listen
Lasting legal protections for the unborn will never come by ignoring the wishes of voters and attempting to subvert the majority. Instead, a consensus-minded coalition-building that is open to dialogue and compromise is the only way that a culture of life in public policy can be created.
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The Vice Presidency: Not a Reliable Ticket to the White House
As Mike Pence discovered
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American secularization hasn’t followed the script that secularization theory would predict
Secularization in the U.S. hasn’t proceeded along the lines that secularization theory predicted. Why not? What does it all mean?
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Abortion and Pro-Life Politics: A Conversation, Part II
“The United States is a liberty theme park. When we’re bullies, we lose.”
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Abortion and Pro-Life Politics: A Conversation, Part I
In this moment, there’s no substitute for a deep historical understanding of the politics of abortion
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Review: Why we still need Jonathan Edwards
American Christians today may be in danger of venerating Jonathan Edwards either too much or too little
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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...
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The Danger of Making Impeachment a Partisan Tool
Oh, the impeachments that might have been!
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FORUM: What Does Higher Education Need Now? Part One
This is one crisis that must not go to waste
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Historicism vs. Darwinism: which was more dangerous?
This essay previous ran on The Anxious Bench on 08/22/2023. Historicism was a greater challenge than Darwinism to some late 19th-Century evangelicals’ Christian faith. If you ask the average educated American Christian what new academic idea presented the greatest challenge...
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Ohio’s Issue 1: Pro-Lifers v. Democracy
Abortion opponents in Ohio just suffered a major defeat at the polls when voters rejected Issue 1 on August 8. It was a needless defeat that was entirely of their own making because abortion wasn’t even on the ballot. Instead,...
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Ranking the Presidents
A guide for the perplexed
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Lincoln’s model for reflective, humble patriotism
Today—the day before the Fourth of July—is the 160th anniversary of the end of the largest and most significant battle of the Civil War. There were more casualties in the Battle of Gettysburg than in any other battle of the...
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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christian apologetics
This post is cross-posted from the Anxious Bench, where it ran on 06/26/2023. It was a hot summer in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. The temperature soared to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in August and highs remained in the 90s for weeks....
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The Unexpected Complications of the Abortion Debate
Review: Roe: The History of a National Obsession by Mary Ziegler. Yale University Press, 2023. 248 pp., $27.00 The first time I heard Mary Ziegler present her scholarship on abortion was more than a decade ago, before she had published...
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Juneteenth: letters from free people
What was it like to experience the first taste of freedom after a lifetime in slavery? Two letters from 1865 help to answer that question by showing both the jubilation that formerly enslaved people experienced immediately after emancipation and the...
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