Martin Luther

In The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Michael Sandel eloquently argues a sobering idea: America can pursue meritocracy or the common good, but not both.

Our religious freedom is one of these modern privileges that previous generations would have envied. Reviewing religious persecution in the past can help Christians appreciate the freedoms they have now.

Herbert Butterfield’s Christian faith essentially inspired his view of history and government and made him the English forerunner of a hopeful Christian Realism as an alternative to both Western secular materialist liberalism and collectivist atheist Marxism.

The most profound and powerful reasons for religious freedom are Christian reasons, and they extend not only to Christians but to all people. In my view this means that there is also a deep theological warrant for international religious freedom.

To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary.

Two Christian schools of thought might support covert operations and espionage: the just war tradition and a kind of “dirty hands” moralism. The dirty hands view says all those in political power must unavoidably resort to evil for the common good. The just war tradition has a different approach.

Four hundred years ago, the Second Defenestration of Prague occurred when a Protestant mob threw the Austrian emperor’s representatives out of a castle window. The Bohemians then started the Thirty Years’ War, which changed the course of world history and led to today’s nation-state world order.

If Michael Doran and Walter Russel Mead insist that Christian eschatology is relevant to American foreign policy, it makes sense to at least mention and analyze amillennialism and preterism.

The long history of Christian reflection does not share Mark Labberton’s confidence that “God so loved the world” means the rejection of power and worldly politics.