Liberalism

It is understandable that for many evangelicals their smile has given way to a frown in an increasingly aggressive and hostile secular culture. It is this reality that Timothy Keller and John Inazu engage in Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference.

While it is still too early to ascertain the COVID-19 pandemic’s damage to our country and the world, it is already evident that the crisis will result in structural changes within and among countries.

In my wide-ranging conversation with Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, we cover Christian realism, nationalism, classical liberalism,…

Beginning in 1940, Reinhold Niebuhr made the case for a sober, realistic, and morally grounded US involvement overseas, out of the central admission that whatever America’s own faults, a punctilious detachment from world affairs might very well result in the triumph of greater imbalances and injustices

Jealousy, love, and punishment are not bad ways of understanding the rise in both government-based religious discrimination and societal religious discrimination, as Jonathan Fox shows in his newest book, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me: Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities.

A theologian’s task in time of plague is to show the light and give people hope. In recent years, many of us trained as theologians have traded our office for that of the pundit and scold. That we have so little worthwhile to say now, in this unprecedented time of fear and uncertainty, is yet one more sign of judgment.

If we are going to get anywhere in this debate about liberalism, we should take on the strongest arguments from our opponents and not their weakest or most caricatured. While I do not think Christians should see liberal democracy as the enemy, I do think its critics often have a point.

Nationalism should form the bonds of social contract in any great power, and should not just be an idea that is despised by the far-left and usurped by the far-right.

The confounding of contentious liberal theories with actual concrete polities stems from the assumption that liberal democratic states are somehow the product of liberal theories.