From April 18, 2012, “Max Weber doesn’t live here anymore“: The effort to delineate strict boundaries and to require unquestioning compliance with “the big four” (anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-evolution, anti-environmentalist) only works because evangelicals seem to desire such boundaries. The tribal impulse is being manipulated by the fundraisers and vote-herders of the religious right, but it seems to have preceded them. So where does it come from? I think it arises, in part, from salvation anxiety. That’s a term sometimes used to describe... Read more

Ignoring hateful bullies doesn't make them go away. Read more

Long discussions of subsidiarity are shameless clickbait. Read more

Here, in time, there’s just this day, this dreadful Saturday of not knowing. Read more

That time when Fox News literally poisoned the Rev. Rick Warren. Read more

Art Bell's weird and wild forum wasn’t receptive to malice and so the malicious weren’t rushing to seek it out. Read more

You can chase Roger Williams through the winter woods and bar him from Puritania, but you don’t get to tell him who he is and what he believes. Read more

The exact same people who bullied those kids back in grade school are now bullying those kids from the highest offices, and the exact same people who stood by and let it happen back in school are doing the very same thing again. Read more

This, in a nutshell, is the story of American politics over the past 50 years. Read more

Look back over the past thousand years — or the past hundred years, or the past 10 years — and tally up the death toll from witch hunts. Read more