Wrapping up my latest series on TGR with a little light speculation about the inner life of the Trinity:

Is there work in the inner life of the Trinity? Perhaps we can’t know. But everything in the outward operation of the Trinity (God’s creation and redemption of the world, and all his relations with it) has to come out of the inner life of the Trinity.

Occasion for these reflections is the thought that we tend not to think of fatherhood as a form of “work,” which diminishes our appreciation of how the agency of God is represented in the image of God as a father:

Notice that for Paul, what sharply differentiates the Christian conception of the divine from pagan conceptions is not only the sole lordship of Jesus over all but also the sole fatherhood of God over all.

That’s a lot of dirty diapers.

This series was great fun and richly rewarding for me. Not sure what to write about next – taking suggestions!

Today, Christian History Institute runs a sneak preview of my forthcoming eBook on how Luther’s 95 Theses can challenge the church today:

Mark Greene of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity put the issue [of following God in our work and other daily activities] into sharp focus when he spoke to the Lausanne Movement gathering in 2010, the largest global conference of evangelical leaders ever held.

He observed that most Christians think the job of the church is to recruit people to join the church and participate in its programs to spread the gospel. On that model, he pointed out, the 98% of Christians who are not church employees are neither envisioned nor equipped by the church to serve Jesus in 95% of what they do with their waking hours.

As Greene said: “What a tragic waste of human potential!”…

Five hundred years ago, Brother Martin was facing a dilemma that had important similarities to ours. In his world, works of religious devotion had become something separate from ordinary life, similar to the way we put our faith front and center on Sunday but struggle to do the same on Monday…

If you have any theses for disputation to offer in reply to my thoughts, they’re very welcome!

And mark your calendars for Oct. 31, 2017, the 500th anniversary date, for the release of The Church on Notice.

With this post, Hang Together becomes my personal blog. The old content remains available but I’ll be the sole contributor going forward. I’m deeply grateful for those who contributed to HT over the years.

In September 2012, four friends and I created Hang Together, under the banner shown above, as a group blog to discuss whether and how the original vision of the American experiment in religious freedom and goodwill across religious and partisan lines might be renewed. For a time, the group discussion thrived. Eventually, however, other contributors – including a new one added to fill the gap – fell away.

Although this was partly because we were all busy, I now see that we were also trying to have the wrong conversation. Surprising as this is to me, our original vision – which we thought was so forward-looking – actually took for granted far too much continuity in our national political landscape. HT was a conversation among people who were conservatives as well as Christians, striving to overcome political as well as religious polarization. The problem is that conservatism more or less no longer exists, and the conversation we need to renew America is not one in which a discussion of conservatism is going to play a large role, except insofar as forensic diagnosis of the successes and failures of conservatism before its disintegration will be necessary to understand the challenges ahead.

Below the jump, the complete text (with images) of the original expression of the vision for Hang Together is preserved for posterity. I’m looking forward to ongoing conversations with all our contributors in the years to come.

Continue reading →

Today, the Acton Institute carries an article I co-wrote with Victor Claar on our age of economic anxiety:

This is not a mere selfish concern about who gets how much of what. It is a moral anxiety, a concern about what kind of people we are becoming. Is America still a country where it pays to “work hard and play by the rules,” in Bill Clinton’s famous phrase? Or have we become the kind of place where cheaters consistently get ahead and slackers get a free ride—where working hard and playing by the rules is for chumps?

The essay is adapted from a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Markets and Morality Victor and I co-edited on the legacy of the Keynesian Revolution:

We are all Keynesians now, in a chilling sense. Through the cultural effects of the Keynesian Revolution, we have been taught to think of ourselves fundamentally as consumers, as bundles of desires striving to be satisfied, rather than as producers of good things that improve the world and serve humanity. We have been taught to think only of what satisfies present desires, not to build up good things over time so our grandchildren inherit a better world. “In the long run we are all dead,” Keynes said, banishing from our horizons any concern for what kind of world we leave our descendants when we go. And we have been taught to think of ourselves as cogs in a vast machine, under the control of managerial experts. To accommodate the experts’ demands we must all be ready to reorder our lives down to their very roots—since taking control of the economy necessarily involves exercising ever-greater control of all areas of human life.

There is a sense in which even the anti-Keynesians are all Keynesians now. The major schools of economic thought that have emerged to challenge Keynesianism—the Chicago and Austrian schools—developed within the amoral discourse incubated in the neoclassical period and consolidated by Keynes. They share, in a somewhat mitigated but essentially similar form, Keynesianism’s privileging of consumptive preferences over productive purposes, and its reductive inability to think cross-generationally. And while they strive to resist the Keynesian tendency to justify the encroaching powers of managerial technocracy, their acceptance of Keynesianism’s materialistic anthropology and morally shallow categories for thinking about economic activity leaves them unable to offer the effective resistance to creeping totalitarianism that is one of their primary goals.

Check it out!

Jeff Blehar asks the question of our time:

Why is Sen. Ben Sasse the only politician in America who even attempts to communicate to voters this way?

“This way” as in this way:

10. Bizarrely, many on the center-left seem not to see that there is little that some on the President’s team would love more than to transform this into a fight about historical monuments.

11. I wish more folks understood how many of the monuments now being debated are not really from the post-Civil War period as a way to remember war dead. Rather, contrary to popular understanding, many of these statues were explicitly erected as Segregation Monuments in the twentieth century, during Jim Crow…

12. But I’m also against mobs tearing down the statues, or city governments removing them in the middle of the night…

13. Every single place I’ve been this week, I’ve gotten a question like this:
**”Washington and Jefferson owned slaves; do we have to tear down their statues too?”
**”Explorer X didn’t treat native Americans the way he should have; do we abandon states west of the Appalachian Trail?”
**”Even Tom Osborne isn’t a saint; must we tear down the statute outside Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium?”

The people asking these questions (over and over and over) are not racist. Rather they’re perplexed by the elite indifference to their fair questions…

That’s a small sample of a very impressive essay.

When MLK was murdered, RFK heard the news just as he was about to step on stage and address a mostly black audience. His advisors urged him to cancel. Instead he stepped out onto the stage and extemporaneously gave a moving speech about how the forces of love and justice would ultimately prevail – a speech so powerful it’s still remembered. Off the top of his head he quoted Aeschylus.

That is the job we hire political leaders to do. The absence of leaders who can and will do this job is why our crisis is so out of control.