3/19/12 – Now available on iTunes U: the newest episode of The Policast, the political affairs podcast I host with my colleagues Chris Moore and Sam Mulberry. Our general theme this time is religion and politics: specifically, models for Christian engagement with (or disengagement from) American politics; the attention (or lack of it) paid to religion by … More On This Episode of The Policast…
At the end of last week, I had students in my Human Rights in International History course read and respond to an article by Joel A. Nichols, “Evangelicals and Human Rights: The Continuing Ambivalence of Evangelical Christians’ Support for Human Rights” (published in the Journal of Law & Religion in 2009). Nichols teaches law at … More Are Evangelicals Ambivalent about Human Rights?
I was struck at the end of last week by a pair of quite different articles that shared two themes: church growth and decline, and conclusions relating those trends to how political or apolitical a church is. First, historian Thomas Kidd’s Patheos column on “The Rise and Fall of American Methodism.” Kidd begins by recapping … More Apolitical Churches
Today marks the official premiere of the second season of The Policast, a political affairs podcast I help co-host. Episodes are available from iTunes U, where you can download individual episodes or subscribe to get new installments as they’re produced. (If you don’t have the iTunes software, you can download it for free.) We first … More The Return of The Policast!
I happen to agree almost entirely with John’s column, but that’s irrelevant. Even if I didn’t share some of his disappointment in Obama the president vs. Obama the candidate, or if I didn’t think that Obama was unusually explicit about his faith by contrast with most of his predecessors in the White House, I’d still … More We Take Care of Our Own: Standing with John Fea
In my über-links post yesterday, I noted how the holiday that honors Martin Luther King, Jr. became an occasion for several writers to invoke King in support of their own positions on a variety of issues. One version of the phenomenon that I didn’t mention came from actor-director George Clooney, speaking about same-sex marriage during … More A Common Moral Inheritance?
With the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary only one and two weeks away, respectively, more and more newspaper editorial boards, political activists, religious leaders, and other powerful individuals and groups have been weighing in with their endorsements of Republican candidates vying to face off against President Obama next November. As an opinion-shaper myself, I … More Jon Huntsman, for Candidate
Yesterday I posted a response to the debate over Dominion theology, which holds that Scripture mandates that Christians control secular institutions, including political ones. There have been several sources for the revival of a debate whose roots go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, but probably the most important was Ryan Lizza’s profile … More Evangelicals and “Dominion” (part 2)
One of the most unlikely hot topics of the past month has been a kind of political theology that, to the extent it achieved any real popularity, peaked in the early 1980s: Dominion theology, or as New Yorker correspondent Ryan Lizza calls it in his now famous profile of Michelle Bachmann, Dominionism. It contends that … More Evangelicals and “Dominion” (part 1)
Earlier this summer, Michael Lind suggested that Barack Obama ought to run for the presidency in 2012 — as a Republican. His (satirical) argument was that Obama’s domestic (if not foreign) policies hearken back to the golden years of liberal-moderate Republicanism (think Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller), a time when being fiscally conservative (but not … More “Saint Mark”: An Appreciation of Mark Hatfield
The Pietist Schoolman 