Making Sense of Religion

Here We Are

Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it
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A Simulacral Age

The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of
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Some Thoughts on ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic? I would expect it
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End of History?

Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a
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Return of the Repressed

In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans
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Sincerely Bad Religion

I wrote a post last week about Tolkien, fantasy, and escape that attempted to make a relatively nuanced argument that fantasy escape can be a healthy thing if one is truly imagining a world that represents a reality that is more real than the prison in which we are currently confined. It is healthy if,
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Toward a Robust Meaning Story

In the past week the subtext of my posts about Reaganism and the ideological capture of the Supreme Court has been the ineffectiveness of Liberals to frame a robust meaning story. This was a theme in Ezra Klein's conversation with Larry Kramer about about why Liberals lose so many political and legal battles. They get
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Bremerton Coach Wins His Crusade

Speaking of religious fanaticism and the courts, I wrote about this guy in May in response to David French's defense of his right to pray on the fifty yard line. He won his day in court 6-3 with Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. Here's how I concluded in my piece in May: It's not clear
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Hip to be Catholic?

What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?” From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova,
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What Do You Believe?

What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. The narrative we choose opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply aspire
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