Where to Put the Theodore Roosevelt Statue

Last updated on: June 24, 2020 at 5:10 pm By D. G. Hart

Not there! New York City’s Natural History Museum, with the blessing of Mayor Bill DeBlasio, has agreed to remove the Teddy Roosevelt Statue outside its entrance. Officials said it hasn’t been determined when the Roosevelt statue will be removed and where it will go. “The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy,” Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president, said in a statement to the Times. “It is time to move the statue and move... Read more

Mapping Disease and Religion

Last updated on: June 18, 2020 at 4:37 pm By D. G. Hart

FiveThirtyEight carries a story on disease among African-Americans and includes a map of the states and counties that had the highest concentrations of slavery. Here is the map: Here’s a description of this region from the story: On major health metrics in the U.S., the shaded counties on the antebellum map still stand out today. Maps of the modern plagues of health disparities — rural hospital closings, medical provider shortages, poor education outcomes, poverty and mortality — all glow along... Read more

Maybe Rusty Reno Had A Point

Last updated on: June 8, 2020 at 5:17 pm By D. G. Hart

Back at the beginning of the various state and federal directives to stay at home in response to COVID-19, Reno, the editor at First Things, worried that public officials had lost sight of considerations other than disease and health: At the press conference on Friday announcing the New York shutdown, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “I want to be able to say to the people of New York—I did everything we could do. And if everything we do saves just one... Read more

Only the Amish are Amish, (practically) Everyone Else is Modern

Last updated on: June 5, 2020 at 4:37 pm By D. G. Hart

The Amish have thick communities in which members are not autonomous but are deeply embedded within a web of familial, religious, and economic relationships. The downside is that Amish is an identity that you can’t take to the suburbs and say have a desk job downtown at the bank and then practice your faith in Bible studies, family worship, and Sunday meetings. The upside is that you have lots of built-in support from a remarkably resilient community. For instance: When... Read more

Being Evangelical, Being Gay

Last updated on: June 3, 2020 at 12:43 pm By D. G. Hart

The rise of a gay rights movement coincided with the emergence of the religious right in the Republican Party — both started in the 1970s and made sizable dents on electoral politics in the 1980s and beyond. Someone might well argue that they fed off each other as positions on opposite sides of the culture wars that allowed Republicans and Democrats — who moved the needle little in different directions over the economy, military, and foreign policy — to campaign... Read more

David French Must Have Jonah Goldberg Scratching His Head

Last updated on: May 28, 2020 at 4:47 pm By D. G. Hart

French and Goldberg used to write for National Review but recently moved to an outlet more anti-Trumpian, the Dispatch. In both publications, a generic conservatism provided a tent big enough for each writer. Where Goldberg can go deep into the weeds of conservative ideas and theorists, French usually relies on his training as an attorney, experience in the military, and his very basic understanding of Christianity — which is to say evangelical. When French writes about law or the workings... Read more

I Just Wish Evangelicals Were Consistent

Last updated on: May 21, 2020 at 3:49 pm By D. G. Hart

First, they rejected business: Finney preached even more explicitly against the mores of business. “The whole course of business in the world is governed and regulated by the maxims of supreme and unmixed selfishness,” Finney said. “The maxims of business generally current among business men, and the habits and usages of business men, are all based upon supreme selfishness.” Finney indicted capitalism itself, arguing that the “whole system recognizes only the love of self” and “the rules by which business... Read more

How Weird is Episcopacy?

Last updated on: May 20, 2020 at 5:23 pm By D. G. Hart

The piece by Tara Isabella Burton in the New York Times on weird Christianity is strange in more ways than one. A reader may have well thought that evangelical Protestants are the weirdest of all professing Christians. They are bigoted, vote for even more bigoted candidates, and cultivate practices like worship music (led by “rock” bands) and megachurches. These are strange pieces of piety that surely the editors and writers at the Times find bizarre. But evangelicals do not fit... Read more

Where Integralists (Vermeule) and Americans (Linker) Agree (with Douthat to the rescue)

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 2:29 pm By D. G. Hart

(For some background on intergralism vs. liberalism, see this and the links included.) Rod Dreher seems to be convinced that First Things magazine has run out of steam. The idea of harmonizing Roman Catholicism and the American political tradition, once very attractive, is no longer viable. First Things burst onto the world in 1990. Its editor-in-chief, Richard John Neuhaus, was a Catholic priest and a convert, but he had a broad and generous ecumenical vision. He and his co-founders wanted... Read more

Can Love Save Liberalism

Last updated on: May 12, 2020 at 5:28 pm By D. G. Hart

Liberalism is on the rocks and it is not coming from conservative talk-radio hosts. For some on the Left, neo-liberalism is a sell-out (no pun intended) to the inequalities of capitalism. That debate has less religious resonance than the critique that Roman Catholic integralists have recently posed against political liberalism. (This website has run a series of articles about integralism.) These two paragraphs from this essay boil down the nature of the conflict well: “Liberalism tends to think that human... Read more