thought exercise on Conservatism and Liberalism

Alvin Plantinga, the Christian philosopher, endorses a view inspired by Calvin and Aquinas, against which he anticipates the objection that the view is "fundamentalist. But isn’t all this just ...

There’s a story that used to make the rounds about the German theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich’s theology was considered dangerous by many Christians in the U.S. Supposedly one time after delivering a...

A fascinating study recently revealed differences in brain structure correlate with political orientation. The study demonstrated that greater conservatism was associated with increased gray matter vo...

Interpretive strategies have gone through cycles of strict-constructionist (or Originalism) and broad-constructionist (or Living Constitution) perspectives. Originally the procedure of interpreting th...

I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...

For most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched. Some political scien...

You may have heard about confirmation bias, which is the tendency to embrace information that supports our viewpoints. The antidote to confirmation bias is to intentionally expose ourselves to other v...

As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come wi...

G. K. Chesterton was well-known (and iconoclastic) in his defense of tradition in a time when progress was all the rage in Western Europe- in technology, in the sciences, in philosophy. Chesterton, on...

Our first president, George Washington, refused to run as a member of any political party. He wanted to be a president to all Americans. Washington firmly believed that political parties would divide ...

The last 80 years of American politics have unfortunately seen a dramatic increase in political polarization. One reporter likened the relationship between Republicans and Democrats to the famous Shak...

Several years ago, I was speaking at a Christian leadership conference being held in Atlanta, Georgia. After the day’s events, a group of pastors and leaders converged for a late-night meal and conver...

During the 1992 presidential election, I (Rick) was directing the small group ministry at our church. Bill Clinton was running against George H. W. Bush, and given that many evangelicals found Bill Cl...

We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

Though American Christians do have genuine opponents in the public square and in elite institutions, they have often been their own worst enemies, making disastrous political compromises and looking t...

In 2014, researchers at Northwestern University, Boston College, and the University of Melbourne published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a prestigious academ...

Nothing illustrates evangelicals’ infatuation with politics more clearly than a story related by a Christian lawyer. Considering whether to take a job in the nation’s capital, he consulted with the le...

So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...

Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There...

Sometimes a sermon can be a polarizing thing. Once I was preaching to a crowd of New Yorkers about how Christians should respond to the problem of poverty. I will never forget two e-mails that I recei...

The wall Jefferson referred to is designed to divide church from state, not religion from politics. Church and state are specific things: the former signifies institutions for believers to congregate ...

When asked to recant of his writings, Luther replied, “Unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason, I cannot recant. For my conscience is held captive by the word of God and to act ...

In this short excerpt, the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass describes the tension between faith in Christ and faith in a form of Christianity willing to enslave an entire race of peopl...

One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.

Jane Addams (1860–1935), a leading American social reformer, was a dedicated advocate for racial equality, women’s suffrage, and pacifism. In 1931, she was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1900,...

Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, President Lincoln was purported to have said that it was nice to meet the woman who started the Civil War. Stowe’s father was among...

In 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they would be unhappy if a son or daughter married someone from the other party. In a YouGov survey from 2008 . . . 27 percent of...

Noteworthy in this regard is the contribution of the Reformers, particularly Martin Luther, though John Calvin’s contribution is also very significant. Both called for a spirituality in the world that...

A contemplative politics entails a two-part movement, one that parallels Thoreau’s injunction to be wary of trivia and devoted to eternal truths. The first involves an askesis, a kind of self-discipli...