Are All States Confessional?
One common refrain I hear among anti-liberals, especially on the Christian right, is that all states are confessional states in the sense that they have deep dogmatic commitments whose sectarian character is either publicly recognized or, in the case of liberal states, concealed by dishonest rhetoric claiming liberal neutrality. Much like the common refrain on […]
Put Not Your Trust in Princes: On Trump, Impeachment, and Evangelical Christianity
On Thursday, Christianity Today, the flagship newspaper of reflective evangelical Christianity, endorsed the removal of Donald Trump. Today Trump fired back, and his power-worshipping servant, Franklin Graham, put great distance between his family (who helped found CT) and CT’s current leadership. Here is the most powerful passage: To the many evangelicals who continue to support […]
Rawls, Political Liberty, and Freedom of Exit
In Political Liberalism, John Rawls revises his theory of justice by adopting a stronger position on the priority of political liberty, which includes not merely the right to vote but the right to participate in the electoral process, to run for office, and so on. He writes, … we must take an important further step […]
The British Working Class Prefers a Culture War to a Class War
Provocative post title, but here’s my analysis of the UK election. Many members of working classes in the US and the UK are strongly anti-elite. Some of that is unwarranted, but some arguably is. British and American elites failed in the early 2000s, in both foreign policy and economic policy. And I think that has […]
Why Do We Disagree So Much? Maybe the Space of Reasons is Extremely Populous
The point of this blog is to try and reconcile people with different perspectives, and that is bound up with analyzing the nature and sources of disagreement. I’ve written on the topic in Must Politics Be War? as well as in shorter essays, but I usually focus on epistemic reasons we disagree, such as limits […]
Diversity Destabilizes Integralism
In my last post, I distinguished between ideal and non-ideal theory in Catholic integralism, in part to lay the groundwork to criticize integralism. My aim is to do so judiciously. People are often so horrified by integralism that they dismiss it with derision and insult. I want to do better. Here I want to develop […]
Integralist Ideal Theory and Non-Ideal Theory
Political philosophers have been discussing the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory in earnest for about ten years. But they’ve tended to apply the debate to liberal and socialist theories of justice and legitimacy. What happens when we try to apply some of this literature to the new Catholic integralism? There are lots of ways […]