Puritans

Stephen Wolfe has written an intellectually serious book, not an action plan. But its appeal is limited to a handful of idiosyncratic, patriarchal Calvinists.

Burke is a defender of the institutions of Christian civilization. Understanding this liberates us from the need to defend failing institutions simply because those institutions happen to exist.

Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit” is an invitation to rethink a seemingly self-evident thought, that our social and economic position should be dictated solely by whether we deserve to have that position.

At a time when some challenge the morality and religious character of America’s first founders, the plain facts of the 1620 Mayflower Compact, a theologically informed social compact for believers and non-believers alike, remind us of the good seeds planted in our shared past.

Of course America will survive the coronavirus. We’ve many times survived far worse.

Formal religious adherence is declining, but America’s longtime religious self-identity as a lodestar of democratic responsibility in the world continues unabashed.

While there is enormous merit to Michael Doran’s binary and overall thesis in his First Things essay, there are some complicating factors that obscure the “wondrous chasm” between Jacksonianism and Progressivism.

This article, delineating the two kinds of freedom found in the tradition of Western civilization, was originally published in Christianity and Crisis on October 19th, 1942. Editor Henry P. Van Dusen clarifies the two strands of freedom that have developed in European thought. One comes from the Protestant Reformation, a freedom that comes as a result of being created in God’s image and the rights that entail; the other comes from the Enlightenment, a freedom that is intrinsic to man’s nature and “self-evident,” something that is somehow apparent to all.

This article about the viewpoints of Christians & the Church in response to World War II was originally published in Christianity & Crisis on June 15, 1942.