Image: Adobe StockMapping the Terrain of Conservative Constitutionalism
The cause of the Founders has been hitched to those strains of conservatism that have long been aching for a twilight struggle and a Holy War.
Prof. Hadley Arkes delivers the 2017 Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture on America’s Founding Principles at Princeton University's James Madison Program (James Madison Program)Why We Should be Grateful to Religious Groups at Election Time
Image: Sean Bear / Shutterstock.comEvangelicals and the Challenge of Moral Education
Spadaro and Figueroa’s “Ecumenism of Hate”
Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa’s article, “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism: A Surprising Ecumenism,” in La Civiltà Cattolica (described by Spadaro as a “peer-reviewed magazine” whose “articles are always read and approved by the [Vatican’s] Secretariat of State”) is a bungled opportunity. The stark Manichean colors with which they paint their subject, and the apocalyptic tones they sound, combined with a muddled understanding of different currents in American evangelicalism, obscures rather than illuminates their argument.
No Protestants on the Bench
As it does every year, a new Supreme Court term has begun in Washington. This time, however, the Court’s composition is a bit unusual. At the moment, the Court has only eight members; a successor for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away in February, has not yet been appointed. But the Court’s composition is unusual for another reason, too: the religious backgrounds of the justices.
America Adrift
For Joseph Bottum, America is a nation adrift. Historically, he says in An Anxious Age, American culture has been like a sturdy stool standing on the three legs of capitalism, democracy, and religion (especially Mainline Protestantism). The first two legs supplied entrepreneurial vigor and buy-in from “the people,” but Christianity gave America moral guidance and a sense of national mission. That three-legged stool served America well until about fifty years ago, when Mainline Protestantism began a protracted, massive decline. Not that the spirit of the Mainline has left us, Bottum notes. Secular elites and the Mainline’s remaining representatives (one might cite…
