The Americas

Mob violence cannot be tolerated, and when threatened should be met with overwhelming force—as a deterrent, and with proportional and discriminant force, or “reciprocal violence” if you prefer—without apology, with far less concern for “optics,” and without any concern for the ideology of the mob if deterrence fails.

Long after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. continues to stir our hearts with his appeal to the nobility of every human being made in the image of God.

Washington is a waystation; Jerusalem is the destination. Only the King of Israel will decide when his kingdom will come. Until then we must live righteously, we must preach his kingdom, we must seek the peace of the city—but we must wait.

In this episode of Marksism, the editors review recent articles Providence published about the riot at the US Capitol on…

We comfort ourselves, saying, “This is not who we are.” But without deeper reflection, such pat answers are lies, strengthening the “vulgarized knowledge” that allow us to ignore the chasms that threaten to consume us.

The term Christian Nationalism has become something of an epithet amongst enlightened evangelicals and Christians of various stripes, especially in light of the travesty at the Capitol.

January 6, 2021, would have been Elshtain’s eightieth birthday. I can only imagine how she would have responded to the events of the day. I do not think she would have been surprised, but nor would she have despaired. Neither should we.

The sad and lamentable truth is that indeed this is who we are, for it was members of our own body-politic who did this, and we cannot heal if we do not confront the uncomfortable facts as they are. It was sedition.

Perhaps the best description of the episode last comes from the Germans. It was a “putsch”: a disorganized, somewhat symbolic strike against legal authority, usually with a rightwing inflection.