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History, Memory, and Repentance

“America is built on the blood of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. It is not the promised land. And what it has become is the rot that has always been underneath the jingoism and nationalism.” The historian Anthea Butler’s words are deliberately unsettling. They are meant to be. Whether one agrees with every part of her diagnosis or not, the force of the statement lies in its refusal of a familiar American assumption: that our problems are recent departures from an otherwise innocent national story. Many Americans have long imagined the nation through biblical imagery. The continent became a promised land. Settlers became pilgrims. Expansion became destiny. Prosperity became evidence of blessing. The language changed over the centuries, but the structure remained remarkably consistent. America was not merely a nation. It was a nation with a providential purpose. The difficulty is that there has always been another story beneath that story. The land was already inhabited. The...
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​What We Have Learned to Admire

A pastor was explaining why Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric did not trouble him. “I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek,” he said. “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.” The statement generated predictable political reactions. Some applauded the candor. Others condemned it. Yet the most interesting thing about the remark may not be its politics but its theology. The pastor was not merely expressing support for a candidate. He was offering a vision of the world. At the center of Christianity stands a strange claim: that power is most clearly revealed not in domination but in self-giving love. Christians gather around the memory of an executed Messiah. They tell stories about martyrs, saints, and servants. They read teachings that bless the meek, commend mercy, and instruct disciples to love enemies. For two thousand years, Christians have struggled to live up to those teachings. Failure is hardly new. Wh...
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​The Exvangelical Question

The recent HuffPost article on “exvangelicals” is not especially careful sociology, but it is attentive to a real cultural and theological phenomenon. Many people who once inhabited conservative evangelical churches now describe themselves as “exvangelicals,” a term that suggests not merely a change of denomination but a kind of exodus. The article frames this largely as a response to the fusion of religion and partisan politics. While the headline overstates the case, the issue deserves attention. What is striking is that many of these former evangelicals are not rejecting Christianity because they found the gospel too demanding. Rather, they seem to be rejecting churches that no longer appeared to them to be governed by the gospel at all. American religion has always existed in proximity to political power. The churches have never floated above history untouched by economics, nationalism, race, region, or ideology. But there are moments when the relationship between religion and po...
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The New Babel

A recent Mother Jones article, “The God Complex” by Kiera Butler, examines the increasingly religious language surrounding artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley. The article’s central observation is difficult to dismiss: many of the most enthusiastic advocates of AI no longer speak about technology merely as a tool or an industry. They speak about it as destiny. The rhetoric is strikingly theological. AI will overcome scarcity. AI will cure disease. AI will solve problems beyond ordinary human comprehension. AI may even help humanity transcend mortality itself. The builders of these systems increasingly present themselves not simply as entrepreneurs, but as custodians of the human future. One need not oppose technology to recognize the religious shape of this discourse. Human beings have always wrapped technical achievement in stories of transcendence. The industrial revolution promised liberation through machinery. The atomic age promised mastery through science. The digital r...
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​When the Machines Ask What It Means to Be Human

There is a certain historical symmetry in watching a pope named Leo issue a major social encyclical about artificial intelligence. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII confronted the moral dislocations of the industrial revolution in Rerum Novarum . Factories had transformed labor. Capital had become concentrated. Human beings were increasingly treated as interchangeable units within economic systems optimized for efficiency and profit. Leo’s intervention was not a rejection of modernity, but a moral insistence that economic life must remain accountable to human dignity. Now, more than a century later, Pope Leo XIV has issued Magnifica Humanitas , applying the Church’s social teaching to a different technological revolution. The machinery is no longer steam-powered. The assembly line has become algorithmic. Yet the underlying question remains remarkably familiar: What becomes of the human person when increasingly powerful systems reorganize work, power, and even decision-making itself? That is not...
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Religious symbols are never merely visual

A  recent article in Dazed on Jewel Yang’s photobook Genesis Vanishing describes a project that is at once contemporary and strangely ancient. Yang paints sacred imagery directly onto human skin—angels, seraphim, fish, wounds, wings—and in doing so turns the body into a temporary icon. The medium is make-up, that most fleeting of arts. The subject is the divine. The modern world often treats beauty in one of two ways. It is either trivialized as mere surface or recruited into the service of commerce, branding, and self-display. What makes Yang’s work interesting is that it seems to resist both habits. Her use of make-up is not simply decorative. It is symbolic. It is tactile, embodied, and transient. It suggests that beauty may still function as a threshold to meanings deeper than fashion alone can bear. Religious symbols are never merely visual. They come freighted with memory, devotion, taboo, longing, and argument. A fish, an angel, the wounds of a martyr—these are not neutr...
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All Shall Be Well, But Not Cheaply

Every now and then, history does us the kindness of putting our complaints in perspective. That is not to say our complaints are unreal. A ruined morning can still be a ruined morning. The car will not start. The email you meant to send was not sent. The meeting went badly. The rain began just as you stepped outside. One should not despise the small aggravations of ordinary life. They are part of being human. Still, history has a way of clearing its throat. David Carpenter, the great historian of medieval England, reminds us that to live now—at least for many of us—is to live with protections our ancestors could scarcely imagine. We take for granted a political order in which conflict, however bitter, is ordinarily contained by law, election, debate, and institution. Thirteenth-century England knew no such settled blessing. Civil war meant burned property, slaughtered enemies, massacred Jews, hungry peasants, and towns pulled into the machinery of violence. And then there was hunge...
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