I drove through four states yesterday. I didn’t get out of the car much, but when I did make stops I didn’t see many masks. When I got to my hotel I read Ed Yong’s piece at The Atlantic. Here […]
individualism
What about proof of vaccination?
Here is Dr. Leana Wen at The Washington Post: For months, I have been criticizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for being too cautious with its guidance for what fully vaccinated people can do. I saw little incentive […]
Pope Francis’s scathing critique of American life
Yesterday at The New York Times, Pope Francis published an excerpt of his new book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. He offers a devastating critique of the selfishness that we Americans try to pass off as […]
Why don’t white evangelicals vote for Democrats?
Historian Daniel Williams, in a thought-provoking piece at The Anxious Bench, asks: Why have white evangelicals been so antipathetic to Democrats, even before their disagreements with Democrats over abortion or LGBT issues emerged? And can anything ever convince them to […]
What COVID-19 exposed about the United States
All of these points come from Ed Yong’s recent piece at The Atlantic: “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” We under-fund public health. Our health-care system is weak. Too much of what we do spend on healthcare is wasted. We have not […]
Citizenship is More Than Just the Facts We Learned in Civics Class
History News Network is running my piece on history and citizenship. Here is a taste: Good students and teachers of history understand full well that history is more than just “the facts.” Yet even they may fail to grasp the […]
A Time for Citizenship
It’s not really that difficult to be a citizen in times like these. Health officials are telling us to stay six feet apart, wash our hands, avoid crowds, self-quarantine, and check on our older neighbors. If we want to get […]
Trump and “Expressive Individualism”
Some good analysis here by Ronald E. Osborn: In a 2011 article in First Things, the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart pondered why so many literary depictions of the devil present him as attractive, witty, stylish and debonair. If there […]
W.H. Auden on Catholicism and Protestantism
Here is another Protestant Reformation post. This one is stolen from Alan Jacobs’s blog Snakes and Ladders. What follows is a quote Jacobs posted today from Auden‘s review of Erik Erickson’s Young Man Luther: The Christian doctrine which Protestantism emphasizes is that […]
Is Freedom a Biblical Concept?
Earlier today I posted a piece from Rod Dreher’s blog about patriotic worship. At the end of the piece I was struck by Dreher’s “update” in which he published a message he received from one of his readers. Here it […]
What Is Water?
Earlier today, in a post on the humanities in the Silicon Valley, I linked to a video excerpt from the late David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. Many of you are familiar with it. Here is the entire […]
A Religious Case for Opposing Religious Liberty?
After reading Darryl Hart’s post on Yuval Levin‘s views on religious liberty I have placed Levin’s book The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism on my reading list. Here is a taste of Hart’s post: Yuval […]
“Why Study History” on Mars Hill Audio
The new Mars Hill Audio Journal is out. In the opening interview, I chat with host Ken Myers about the relationship between individualism and the study of history. Here is the synopsis:Guests on Volume 124: John Fea, on how American individualism […]
John Dilulio on Catholicism and Radical Libertarianism
John Dilulio John Dilulio was the first director of the White House Office dedicated to faith-based initiatives. (And helped the Obama administration restructure the office). Since then, he has worked at the University of Pennsylvania as the Frederic Fox Leadership […]
The Right to be Unlimited
Andrew Bacevich reviews George Packer’s new book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University. Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. According to […]
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn on the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
Lasch-Quinn Lasch-Quinn describe her latest visit to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University Of Virginia, an institute run by James Davison Hunter. But what makes IASC stand out so much for me, what makes it so […]
Was William Penn a Self-Made Man?
Jim Cullen continues blogging his series on the rise and fall of the “self-made man” in American culture. Yesterday’s entry was on William Penn. Cullen argues that Penn was a bit of paradox. He was a champion of Quaker equality, […]
Roger Williams: Self-Made Man
At some point I hope the Christian Century will publish my review of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul. But if you cannot wait that long for a Williams fix, I would encourage you to check out […]
The Founding Fathers, Barack Obama, and “Taking Care of Our Own”
Here’s a piece that I wrote after Obama’s acceptance speech last Thursday night. We were not able to place it as an op-ed (still trying), so I have posted it here. –JF The Founding Fathers would have been proud […]
This Week’s Anxious Bench Post at Patheos: “Finding Hope at a Middle School Graduation Ceremony”
My daughter graduated from eighth grade tonight. I was very proud of her. As the president of her middle school’s student council she had the opportunity to address the audience and introduce the evening’s festivities. After a few inspirational charges […]