The Holy Week Reader: Palm Sunday witnessed the rise of two cities in the world of humanity. Christians are citizens of both. Attendant responsibilities follow.

Christmas alone is perfectly congruous, for Christmas brings to the surface those imperishable values for which men in all this struggle of power are really groping. It focuses men’s thoughts, at least for the moment, upon the secret of ultimate power.

In Safe Passage, Kori Schake details how transitions in geopolitical power lead to violence, except when the United States slowly and peacefully took over the hegemonic role Great Britain played.

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.

The underlying problem with the Declaration, in my view, is that it is absolutely necessary to understand power in context. Power and the questions of authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty itself are products of time and place—and those phenomena change fundamentally with time.

Crouch’s book is a masterful and sorely needed correction regarding the nature and possibilities of power but it stops short precisely at that place where 21st-century American Christians are most perplexed with power: politics.