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From his very first line, Joshua Mauldin establishes immediately what is at stake in his new thought-provoking volume Barth, Bonhoeffer, & Modern Politics: “Modern democracy is in crisis.” The modern liberal democratic project does seem to teeter perpetually on a knife’s edge. Critics and prognosticators routinely predict its demise. While there has been no shortage…
Beloved author J.R.R. Tolkien survived the First World War’s trenches, confronted the intellectual challenges and questions of modernity, and then wrote his epic works of high fantasy, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, during the horrors of the Second World War. After the perils and high heroic deeds of their quest to destroy…
It’s no secret that tensions exist in the ways that the government of the United States treats “religion” in different contexts. In the domestic sphere, private corporations can, as of 2014, essentially opt out of obeying the laws they deem incompatible with their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Yet in terms of foreign policy, the same…
Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were theological titans of the twentieth century who naturally wrote mostly about the interpretation of Christian doctrines. That they remain relevant to social ethics and political theology cannot be assumed; such a claim must be defended. Both theologians might seem to be prime candidates for the verdict that too much…
Every now and then, social media resurfaces a meme I’ve come to think of as the “American Jesus” post. A screenshot from a conversation on Facebook, the post reads: “The Bible was written entirely by the greatest American who ever lived: JESUS,” followed by an apparently nonplussed observer asking, “This a joke or [what]?” Although…
The Development of Human Rights Half a century ago, the world welcomed some of the most remarkable human rights documents it had ever seen. The United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These were America’s strongest statutory rebukes to its long and tragic history of…
In a recently issued report, the RAND Corporation highlighted a dimension of the impact that the government response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had on trust. It noted that trust in the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declined significantly between May and October 2020, and it observed that…
Identifying proper boundaries for religious liberty in American public life continues to be a hot-button issue. Stories of friction between religious groups and other members of society have pervaded the headlines, and such conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon. Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has ruled on a number of cases in…
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan open their edited volume At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2020) with an epigraph: Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization—one for home consumption and one for the heathen market? – Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”…
Estate taxes interfere with the transfer of private property at death, raising questions about stewardship, property and power, what we owe our children, and the meaning of bodily death. In this short essay, I consider the wisdom of estate taxes in theological terms. I conclude that an estate tax can be good tax policy, particularly…