TGR carries the first post in my new series on the universal basic income:

The enormous power the UBI would give to American racism points to a real problem of principle underlying its structure: it involves a fundamental change in the political philosophy of care for the poor, breaking with Christian-derived traditions that help the poor on the assumption of the equal dignity of all people, restoring us to the pagan paternalism of the Roman “dole” system.

Let me know what you think!

I’m quoted in today’s TGC story about pastors in Illinois trying to figure out how to navigate the state’s economic budget crisis:

Pastors in Illinois are struggling to figure out how to respond to a crisis of this kind.

“The underlying problem is that for several generations, pastors have not seen these issues as something they need to know anything about, so now they’re unable to do much because they don’t know anything,” said Greg Forster, director of the Oikonomia Network at Trinity International University. “We need to play catch-up and fast.”

Resources here for pastors looking to get a jump start!

TGR carries the conclusion of my series on the biblical epic of Babel:

Recently I contributed to an exchange on how different theological views increase or decrease the importance of nations as morally formative communities. In response to a contributor who was overstating the extent to which the Old Testament narrative affirms this role for the nations, I stressed the origin of the nations as a remedy for sin: “The division of our world into distinct nations is not a feature, it’s a patch for a bug – God’s tourniquet on the hemorrhage of human wickedness.”

As a writer, I’m particularly proud of having produced that line. Yet I knew even as I wrote it that I was leaving out the other side of the account. The nations begin that way, but that’s not how they end. And the difference is the Spirit-empowered daily work of God’s people.

Next up: I get my innings on the UBI.

Law & Liberty carries my contribution to an exchange on whether Protestant theology implies a larger role for nations as morally formative communities:

Protestants have no separate, trans-national class of ethical knowers. This implies that ethics itself is not a trans-national body of knowledge. We learn and debate what is right and wrong within our national (and other cultural) communities. This does not imply cultural relativism or deny natural law. But it does imply that what we call “natural law” is something that is constantly emerging within particular political communities of discourse and practice. It might even be more precise to speak of the nations exhibiting a “natural lawfulness” rather than possessing a “natural law” as such.

Let me know what you think!

Thought you’d like to know that I have a chapter in Christian Higher Education, edited by David Dockery and Christopher Morgan. My chapter considers how the Christian academy impacts the world around us:

This apparent irrelevance of higher education is an optical illusion. In fact, it is the slow things that matter most – and they matter most because they are slow. The slow things are the things that form us, that shape who we are in our most basic consciousness and habits of life, not just what we happen to be interested in at any given 140-character moment….

Humanly speaking, there is no feasible vision for effective Christian influence within the world, or even for faithful Christian living within it, that does not include a new role for institutions of higher education. The underlying cause of our biggest challenges is a change in deep, formative structures; only a response that involves deep, formative structures will be adequate.

Scholarship moves so slowly that Twitter still used 140 characters per tweet when I first wrote that passage!

Check it out and let me know what you think – preferably in that order.