Sublime

Within the church, the challenge of the skeptics put the church on the defensive. Was Jesus really divine? The eighteenth-century church was concerned to prove that he was. This resulted in a reading of the gospels looking for the wrong thing.

If we take seriously the public persona of Jesus as a prophet, the material we think of as ‘moral teaching’, which has been categorized as such by a church that has made Jesus into the teacher of timeless dogma and ethics, must instead be thought of as his agenda for Israel. This is what the covenant people ought to look like at this momentous poin

politics but Federal

The question agitating every defender of democracy is: How can this be reversed? A more precise phrasing would be: How are legitimate elites selected in a democratic society?

without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an “alternative source,” independent of scripture itself. When they speak with one voice, we should listen very carefully. They may be wrong. They sometimes are. But we ignore them at our peril. The study of church history is not, ultimately, a different “subject” from the careful

“No speech in the English language, perhaps no speech in modern times, had ever been as widely diffused and widely read as Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne,” an historian of the period was to write. That speech “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.” It made the Union, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wo

the game, the

It is actually not a question of size, because the government must naturally be large to oversee a highly complex nation. The problem is over-complexity and convolution, with subgroups of experts who do not cooperate, trust each other, or work well together.