Way of Improvement

way of improvement banner

Commonplace Book #305

  |  

While many worry about fragmentation, polarization, and the potential for violence, among leading political actors, the idea of a common good sought through common hopes is nowhere invoked, much less pursued. The ethical boundaries that define solidarity are erected and […]

Russell Moore on Jimmy Carter’s salvation

  |  

Back In December, a podcaster asked Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, if Jimmy Carter was a “born-again Christian.” Jimmy Carter always said he was a born-again Christian, but the podcaster’s question seemed to […]

Peter Wood’s “Black Majority” turns 50

  |  

When I started teaching colonial American history twenty-five years ago, Peter Wood’s Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina was on the syllabus. I used to teach it alongside Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery-American Freedom. (Today my students no […]

‘Don’t Look Up’: Three years later

  |  

Some of you may remember Adam McKay’s movie Don’t Look Up. Wikipedia describes it an “apocalyptic political satire black comedy.” The film starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Cate Blanchett, and Meryl […]

Jimmy Carter at Washington D.C.’s First Baptist Church

  |  

Over the weekend I watched a 2023 C-SPAN piece on Jimmy Carter’s relationship with the First Baptist Church in Washington D.C. The Carters arrived at First Baptist on the Sunday after his inauguration and immediately applied for membership. The C-SPAN […]

Commonplace Book #304

  |  

Puritan perfectionism has, in fact, survived its pluralization into faiths other than Calvinism, and it has survived its pluralization into faiths other than Calvinism, and it has survived its secularization into movements that are self-consciously nonreligious. That ethos endures and […]

Commonplace Book #303

  |  

Outrage against a grievance caused by others, then, becomes the source of authentic identity and authentic action. In this strange calculus, the more rage the better. In turn, rage, hatred, and the desire for revenge that emanate from injury become […]

James Kirby Martin, RIP

  |  

I met James Kirby Martin once. We both spoke at the Fort Ticonderoga Seminar on the American Revolution in 2009. I did not know him well, but he was always kind to me following that meeting and I have learned […]

The Author’s Corner with Lindsey Bestebreurtje

  |  

Lindsey Bestebreurtje is a Curatorial Assistant with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This interview is based on her new book, Built by the People Themselves: African American Community Development in Arlington, Virginia, from the Civil […]

Help us keep our independent voice. Become a CURRENT member!

  |  

Regular readers of Current will notice that we do not accept advertising. Nor do we post “sponsored” articles. We want to maintain an independence voice. Because of this, we look to our readers to support our work through memberships. If […]

What Mike Pence learned from Al Gore

  |  

It’s January 6th. Later today, Vice President Kamala Harris will certify the 2024 presidential election. She will do what Al Gore did in 2000 and Mike Pence did in 2020. Here is Mickael Kruse at Politico: Last summer, in a […]

Commonplace Book #302

  |  

Indeed, the moral undermining of the moral worth of persons in late modern societies is highlighted within contemporary American democracy through the emergence and proliferation of identity groups–those groups around which contemporary identity politics are built. Identity groups are, in […]

Sunday night odds and ends

  |  

A few things online that caught my attention this week: Self-sabotage The era of Taylor Swift What is modernity? Who benefits from identity politics? Adam Hochschild reviews Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a […]

Commonplace Book #301

  |  

The question of moral worth of the human person, as I have posed it, is the fundamental question for any society that imagines itself to be–or aspires to become–genuinely humane. It is definitional and yet it is also a moving […]