Uncategorized
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Trump and the Pope
I think that there are some criteria that can be used to determine whether certain statements and behaviors are indeed aligned with the Christian "ideal", Christianity at its heart does not lead to ideological thinking; it leads rather to a disposition of the heart that Donald Trump, at least in his public behavior and statements, has
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Tweaks You Can Believe In
What is the establishment? It's the existing power arrangements and the conventional thinking that comes with it. If you are an establishment figure, you are fundamentally comfortable with the existing power arrangements. There are problems of course, and the establishment system needs tweaks, and so if you are an establishment political candidate you run as one who will
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If We Undivide, We Become Unconquered
Bernie's new ad: For years I've been writing about how the culture war has been the strategy of the political and economic elites to keep us divided and conquered. Bernie gets that. My solution was to agree to disagree about culture war issues and focus instead on how we are all in the same
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Bernie & Hillary Face Off
The issue for Democrats is not who is the more progressive candidate, but which style of leadership they think will be more effective. Sanders presents himself as a transformational leader and Hillary presents herself as an incrementalist. FDR was a transformational leader, and so was Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary are, or were,
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Trump and Reagan
The American Conservative's Rod Dreher is interesting here about a phenomenon that is affecting conservative pundits in the face of the Trump candidacy: Last summer, as my father lay dying, I sat by his hospital bed watching a Trump rally in Mobile with him and my mother. I listened to the things Trump was saying, and
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Quote of the Day: Elias Isquith
Even more importantly, by replacing Wall Street with small business as capitalism’s true avatar, Clinton makes a class-based analysis of politics all but impossible. And this, really, is the essence of the Clinton/Sanders split. If capitalism has no inherent characteristics or motivations — if a mom-and-pop has just as much of a claim to True
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The Dems’ Debate
I tuned in thinking it would be a bore, but I got hooked. I found it compelling. I think it will have a winnowing effect. Webb and Chafee came off as quasi ridiculous. O'Malley came across as an earnest empty suit. Clinton will win the nomination if most Dems are willing to settle for another
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Stephen Colbert on Loving the Thing He Most Wished Had Not Happened
When Colbert was ten years old, his father and two older brothers were killed in a plane crash. From a GQ profile that came out in late August: That day after he got back from Michigan, we eventually got around to the question of how it could possibly be that he suffered the losses he's suffered
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Pope Francis and the Post-Secularist Imaginary
Conservative Catholics like Ross Douthat worry that western societies are becoming post Christian. I've been arguing here for years that we're not in a post-Christian society, but moving into a post-secular society. It's not about beliefs so much as it's about the way we experience reality. In a secular society our very way of experiencing
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Turning Points 1
I want to do a little thinking out loud about 'turning points'. There are little ones and big ones, world-historical turning points, like the shift from what we now call the premodern to the modern. And there are smaller one's like the shift from the New Deal paradigm in American politics from the '30 through