History

In We the Fallen People, Tracy McKenzie takes on the conviction that the moral intuition of the American electorate is the basis for our democratic flourishing. This belief is summarized in the phrase, “America is great because she is good.”

Strikes by meat packers and mine workers in 1946 prompted Henry P. Van Dusen and Liston Pope to consider the ethics of strikes and how the church should respond.

Soviet Russia demonstrated enormously greater fighting ability than has Red China, and yet even that temporarily invincible totalitarian regime is no more.

With Ukraine languishing outside the safety of the NATO alliance, the consensus seems to be that there is little the alliance can do as Putin enforces his latter-day Brezhnev Doctrine. That consensus view is wrong.

I owed Mother an apology. I had knowingly dismissed her fears. I refused to let fear determine my course. But I had heedlessly exposed my beloved wife and children to mortal dangers.

A nationalized religion and a distinct alphabet unified the Armenians living in the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Iran, and upholding the essence of what it meant to be Armenian.

History turned a corner with the birth of Jesus Christ, and while the written reports of that event don’t tell me everything I want to know, they do tell me everything I need. The Gospels occupy a kind of center point in human culture as a whole: products of a particular time and place, but comprehensible to all.

Conventional manger scenes don’t show it, but besides the ox, the ass, the sheep, and the camels, there was another animal in the room at Christmas: an elephant. And the elephant in the room was the idea that Jesus’ mother was a virgin when He was born. A Yuletide blog that didn’t talk about the elephant wouldn’t be doing its job.

My generation and the generation before us inherited an enormous wealth of spiritual capital from a society shaped by hundreds of years of deep religious faith and engagement. Our environment was shaped by that wealth in ways that many of us did not understand; we took it for granted.