Politics
The Assault on American Excellence By Anthony Kronman Free Press, 2019 288 pages (hardcover), $27.00 Unceasingly inundated as our civilization is with transparently partisan moralizing, I’d wager that the average American intellectual has developed the unenviable habit of being reflexively cynical and numb in the face of any moral screed. We’re constantly on the lookout […]
“Hope for Democracy: How Citizens Can Bring Reason Back into Politics” by John Gastil and Katherine R. Knobloch
Hope for Democracy: How Citizens Can Bring Reason Back into Politics by John Gastil and Katherine R. Knobloch Oxford University Press, 2020 240 pages (paperback), $28.00 For several years now, a steady stream of books has raised grave concerns about the state of American democracy, the deterioration of public discourse, the role of the media, […]
Protestants and American Conservatism: A Short History by Gillis J. Harp Oxford University Press, 2019 323 pages (hardback), $34.95 Since about the time when Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the Moral Majority in 1979 (with lots of help from Republican Party operatives), confessional and evangelical Protestants have generally identified as conservative. In Christian terms, being conservative […]
(1) America (and indeed, the entire world) is in the midst of momentous change. I don’t mean that as a political slogan. It is change we must understand, because it will profoundly affect America’s prospects for renewal. The entire West is in the midst of deep convulsions relating to the death of East-West polarization and […]
Exiled from the land, the Israelites were exhorted by the Lord to use their days wisely. God gave the prophet Jeremiah a letter to read to them (Jer. 29): Babylon was not their home, but they were not to spend these years lamenting for the “good ole days,” as they had been. According to Jeremiah’s […]
The church's witness is necessarily political, but in its political witness the church must first and foremost be the church. Faithfulness to the gospel mission trumps allegiance to any other political agenda. Such is the general consensus among the contributors to Christian Political Witness. Beyond that, when it comes to practical Christian political involvement, the […]
Abraham Kuyper spoke of the danger of a moribund conservatism in his own movement: the separation from the national Reformed Church in the Netherlands. In a sermon preached in Utrecht in 1870, Kuyper complained that a generic conservatism had replaced a genuine Reformed impulse in the church. Gradually recovering from a befuddled spirituality that vaporizes […]
In the summer of 2009, when scholars, pastors, and the historically minded laity were celebrating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, The Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by a constitutional attorney who attempt-ed to give reasons for not only Protestants but all Americans to commemorate the Frenchman's birth. Ac-cording to Doug Phillips, "On […]
Os Guinness, author and social critic, has written or edited more than twenty-five books, including The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It (HarperOne, 2008), which was the topic of the following White Horse Inn interview. A frequent speaker and seminar leader at political and business conferences throughout the world, Dr. Guinness […]
When an alien spaceship destroyed the White House in the 1993 science fiction film Independence Day, I’m told that pre-9/11 moviegoers were not horrified at the possibility and that some even cheered (perhaps because they were a bit cynical about the current occupant of the Oval Office). As the world’s lone superpower, we believe there […]
5. Collegial Governing: The Senate Calvin argued long and hard that government should not and could not do everything; it had to be limited in its task and scope. If it was not, it would run aground as in the time of the Hebrew prophet Samuel. Calvin's sermon on 1 Samuel 8 addresses one of […]
"Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship" by Eric Gregory
This is a significant and learned book. Its basic concern is the theology of Augustine and its implications for citizens seeking to live responsibly in a liberal democratic society. Before I get to Eric Gregory's argument, a few words of explanation about Augustine and "liberalism" may be helpful. As most readers of Modern Reformation know, […]
Smack dab in the middle of a February 1, 1993, front-page Washington Post story on the avalanche of calls to Congress opposing the admission of openly gay soldiers into the military, reporter Michael Weisskopf dismissed the groundswell: "Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars to contrive the kind of grass-roots response that [Jerry] Falwell […]
Confessing Protestants have an uneasy and uncertain relationship with evangelicalism. For many of us, evangelical churches have been part of our past: who hasn't been baptized in a Southern Baptist church? Some of you reading this issue may still be working for reform within evangelical churches. Many others, however, have left evangelicalism looking for something […]
R. C. Sproul tells of the story of his letter to the best selling author of Lords of Discipline commending him on his style. The trend setting novelist replied from his flat in Rome informing Sproul that he had been the first Christian to compliment him on the novel. Raised in a fundamentalist home, this […]
