Category: Politics
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A Christian Defense of James Lindsay’s Interpretation of Gnosticism
James Lindsay, of New Discourses and Sovereign Nations, has come under fire in the de facto public square of Twitter over his definition and application of the term Gnosticism. Lindsay’s efforts over the last few years in pushing back and exposing the intellectual foundations upon which so many civilization-destroying ideologies rest is undeniable. The attacks […]
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The CIA Wants Me to Believe What? — Part 3: Having Read the Fiction Volumes of Sekret Machines
My last two posts were reflections about the non-fiction volumes of Tom DeLonge’s Sekret Machines series. The conclusions I reached based on those two volumes can be summarized in the following points: Each of these elements is on full display in the fictional narrative of the two published volumes of Sekret Machines, subtitled Chasing Shadows […]
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Eunuchs and Transgenderism in the Bible and America
For all the pearl-clutching, gasping, self-righteous fear-mongering related to the specter of an ascendant Christian Nationalism, the side that most-often interjects religion into contemporary political debates is the one that is least religious (in the traditional sense) and most vocal about the benefits of irreligious secularism. That is, the progressive left. It should be clear […]
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The Monopoly on Violence and the Christian View of the State
There is general agreement within the academic disciplines related to political science that the concept of “the state” is founded upon the idea, most famously recognized by Max Weber, as a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Acemoglu, et al. 2013, 6). This idea is more colloquially known as […]
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Telling the Truth When Truth-Telling is Hard to Do: Reflections on Reading Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss
In keeping with the theme of truth-telling that I’ve developed over the last couple of posts, I recently read Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss. The book itself was not written as a book, but it is a collection of four articles with an introduction to their theme–itself based on a fifth […]
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Teleology and a Biblical Perspective on the State
My last two posts have concerned ideas related to arguments made in Stephen Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism. Reactions to my initial post on the topic argued against the relevance of my case that Wolfe’s assertion that civil government’s orgins are natural and prelapsarian is not supported by Scripture. I, on the other hand, disagree. […]
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Why Pre- and Postlapsarian Assumptions Matter for Protestant Political Theory
My last post, wherein I gave my initial reaction to Stephen Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism, got a little more attention than I had anticipated. Most of that attention came via the de facto public square of Twitter. One reaction to that post is particularly helpful in that they thought my argument against Wolfe’s prelapsarian […]
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My Initial Reaction to Stephen Wolfe’s “Case for Christian Nationalism”
The conservative Protestant interwebs have been abuzz over the last week in response to the release of Stephen Wolfe’s book, The Case for Christian Nationalism. As one might expect on platforms like Twitter, a lot of the discourse surrounding the book and its claims falls short when it comes to nuance, sophistication, and reasoned arguments. […]
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Own Your Bias
Given the state of public discourse in the United States today, I can anticipate at least one possible reaction to my previous post, based on my criticism of tolerance as a moral virtue. The predictable reaction is that by criticizing tolerance as a moral virtue I am implicitly encouraging intolerance. But this is not the […]
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Neutrality is Nonsense
In my last post, I mentioned how my own upbringing involved being taught that Christians ought to avoid conflating their religious beliefs with political opinions and positions. Although I don’t have any hard evidence to back it up, I would also claim that most of the adult believers within my immediate sphere, who had a […]