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: […]
Way of Improvement
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 […]
Commonplace Book #262
Socialism is not socialization; it is not the proletariat in power; it is not even material equality. Socialism, grasped in its essential aspect, is the progressive actualization of the idea of liberty and justice among men: an innate idea that […]
The never-Trumpers, the semi-fascists, and the rationalizers
Over at The Bulwark, Nicholas Grossman breaks down the GOP into three categories: TO UNDERSTAND WHY THIS SEGMENT of Republicans is so DeSantis-needy, let’s briefly revisit the typology of the GOP following its crackup. Donald Trump’s election and presidency split […]
Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in historical context
Over at The Washington Post, historians Ansley Quiros and Anthony Siracusa connect the recent removal of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson from the Tennessee legislature to the early civil rights movement in Nashville. Here is a taste of their piece: […]
Sean Feucht continues to confuse the Kingdom of God with the United States of America
We blogged about this over the weekend. Sean is still at it. This time he is in Austin (the second video is from Feucht’s Tulsa comments, the one we wrote about over the weekend). In Christian theology the “King” is […]
Don Lemon is out at CNN
What a day for cable news! Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News. Don Lemon is out at CNN. Here is Lemon’s tweet: Does Lemon’s firing have anything to do with this or this?
Tucker Carlson and Fox News part ways
Here is the Associated Press: Fox News said Monday it has “agreed to part ways” with Tucker Carlson, its popular and controversial host, less than a week after settling a lawsuit over the network’s 2020 election reporting. The network said […]
Abraham Lincoln and democracy
Here is Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo at National Affairs: Lincoln’s “idea of democracy” only establishes what democracy is not, or at least what it cannot include. He never offered a more thoroughgoing definition of what democracy is. But it’s not […]
How Charles Stanley and the Southern Baptists handled the media
Charles Stanley died last week. He was the senior pastor of Atlanta Baptist Church for nearly half a century, a television preacher, and a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Over at Get Religion, veteran religion journalist Terry Mattingly […]
Chris Christie: “An imperfect kamikaze candidate”
Today at Current we are featuring Marvin Olasky’s interview with Atlantic writer (he was at The New York Times at the time of interview) Mark Leibovich. Last weekend The Atlantic published Leibovich’s interview with former New Jersey governor and potential […]
What does J.D. Vance want?
University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant asks this question in a recent longform piece at N+1. It’s a stinging criticism of Ohio’s GOP United States senator. A taste: WHAT MORE DOES J. D. VANCE WANT? With the Yale degree and the […]
Commonplace Book #261
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –George Santayana “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” –William Faulkner “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” –F. Scott […]
Evangelical roundup for April 24, 2023
What is happening in Evangelical land? GOP candidates meet with Iowa evangelicals. More here. The role of evangelical Christianity in Venezuela’s 2024 election. Conservative evangelicals in the Church of England reject the Archbishop of Canterbury. The New York Times obituary […]
Commonplace book #260
The removal of the monuments may reduce pressure on city governments by temporarily quieting racial anger. But it will not make the two races less divided or less prejudiced. It will not improve the worldly lot of any black person […]
Sunday night odds and ends
A few things online that caught my attention this week: John Brown’s farm Tiya Miles reviews David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. Fred Bauer reviews Michael Walzer’s The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective. Thomas […]
Christian nationalist worship leader Sean Feucht says the quiet part out loud
Here is Feucht at Sheridan Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma: Right Wing Watch has the full story. Watch the entire speech.
Commonplace Book #259
The threat to domestic tranquility is not that people take sides and disagree, but that the sides of a political division will assume the purity and passion of moral absolutism or moral allegory, in which the people on each side […]