No. 1 - Hamilton

The proposed Constitution is a test of our people
Whether history will repeat or change its course.
May government be founded on reflection & choice,
Or be subject always to accident & force?

Views will be mixed. Be guided by truth.
(Everyone’s tainted by his own ambition.)
Let me lay my own cards on the table:
The necessity of Union is my highest conviction.

On two things does good government depend:
Energy (the means) and Liberty (the end).

No. 2 - Jay

That Union is key, the People well know.
As a nation we toiled and bled for this land.
Behold what bounty will Union bestow,
Guided withal by a Provident hand.

Divisive men shun.
Learned men prize.
Men of the Convention,
Prudent and wise,
Have proposed (not imposed) for your approbation
A Charter to hearten and prosper our nation.

Nos. 3-5 - Jay

(Each a haiku)

A Union of States
Is less apt to cause a war—
United we stand.

Common interests
Require mutual defense—
Divided we fall.

If not united,
Foreign powers will play us
Off one another.

No. 6 - Hamilton

(Iambic pentameter)

It’s time to wake from the deceitful dream.
We live not in some Utopian age.
The past is not past—we stand in its stream.
Perfect wisdom we have yet to engage.

“Republics pacify! Commerce softens!”
So the opponents of Union will cheer.
But hist’ry says republics war often.
Nat’ral enemies are the ones more near.

The evil: sov’reignties disconnected.
Remedy: more solemn ties effected.

No. 7 - Hamilton

That men love money is as trite as true.
Land and trade, debt and taxes
Will always supply just cause for wars.
Hence we need the constitutional glue—
For common rules, market access
And adjustments by reason, not force.

No. 8 - Hamilton

True, a standing army isn’t banned
But let the dispassionate understand:
Military defense is needed regardless.
No sovereign state can ever be guard-less.

Europe is not the model—
Prone to strife among neighbors divided,
Conflict for them a constant exposure.
Britain rather emulate—
Strong because internally united.
Protected, like us, by an ocean enclosure.

No. 9 - Hamilton

Small republics are unstable—
Violent tendencies.
Confederation is better—
Montesquieu agrees.

No. 10 - Madison

Faction is the problem that demands a solution—
The leading cause of republics’ dissolution.
Virtue alone cannot be the plan—
Faction is sown in the nature of man.

Don’t kill the cause, for liberty suffers.
Control the effects. These are the buffers:
A large republic with interests diverse
Mean power and wealth are widely dispersed.
And elected leaders will opinion refine
To ensure “public interest” is broadly defined.

Where policy rests on broad coalitions,
A republic is cured of factional divisions.

Originally published November 18, 2016

Evangelicals love to talk about the “culture wars,” usually with some mixture of zeal and disdain. I wish we could dispense with the term. It frames our moral agenda all wrong. Christians aren’t called to be at war with their culture. We’re called to be witnesses to the Kingdom of God—in our worship, words, and deeds.

I don’t doubt that bearing witness sometimes feels like war. Jesus promised, after all, that we would have trouble in the world. But rather than fight back, He urged us to “be encouraged” because He has already won the battle—“conquered the world,” as He put it—through His death and resurrection. As evangelicals, we need to focus less on fighting a war with our culture, and more (much more) on following the way of the cross.1

But however we frame our moral agenda, a dilemma remains. For evangelicals, activism has long been a key feature of our faith. Whatever the cause—from abolition of slavery to ending human trafficking, from women’s suffrage to respect for life—evangelicals have been among the country’s most passionate advocates of social change. Indeed, the very definition of “evangelical” includes this sort of Gospel-grounded activism.

But activism often gives rise to moralism, the insistence that our moral preferences be enshrined in law. This conceptual move—from social concern to legal coercion—is easy to make. If X is wrong, then X should be illegal, right? There’s undeniable logical force to that intuition, and most Americans, certainly most evangelicals, think this way.

Christians are called to think critically—which is to say, Gospel-centricly—about our moralist instincts. As Christians, is our moral agenda always a legal agenda? Is it ever? When we link our social cause to the coercive powers of the state, are we being faithful witnesses to a Gospel that insists on “foolish[ness] ... to shame the wise” and “weak[ness] ... to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27)?

These are questions that legal scholar William J. Stuntz takes up in his seminal essay “Christian Legal Theory.” They form Part 3 of this series exploring the theoretical and theological underpinnings of a Gospel-centered theory of law. (Part 1, “Law, Gospel, and foolishness” laid the groundwork for this discussion. Part 2 covered “Justice for the poor.”)

How then shall we legislate?

Let’s get something out of the way at the outset. The question here is not whether we should “legislate morality.” This is hardly a useful approach to the issue. All law is normative, which means all law has moral content. When law ceases to be normative in this way, it ceases to be law and becomes only a will to power, a tool of oppression to be wielded by whoever happens to hold the scepter of public authority. Law devoid of moral content is tyranny.

At some point, everyone’s a moralist. Everyone has a list of moral wrongs they think should be legally punished and moral rights they think the law should encourage, permit, and secure. (Indeed, at its root, what is the democratic process but an attempt to peacefully reconcile competing moralistic visions for society?) The question, then, is not whether we should “legislate morality,” but what kind of morality we should legislate.

Stuntz argues that the proper Christian approach to this issue is legal agnosticism, particularly when the relevant moral principles are contested. When the public is divided over what’s right and wrong, Stuntz insists we should “err on the side of freedom rather than legal restraint.” In his view, we shouldn’t forbid, or at least we shouldn’t criminally punish, “behavior that a large fraction of the populace thinks is morally permissible.”

As a concrete example, Stuntz offers up the morally charged fight over abortion. He thinks this issue is a “good candidat[e] for legal compromise, for solutions that do not award total victory to either side.” Moralists should be seeking to persuade, not legally coerce, targeting the culture instead of the law.

Stuntz tries to ground his legal agnosticism in both Scripture and history. First, he suggests that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’s definition of sin was so expansive as to make true moralism impossible. Society might aspire to punish all murder and adultery, but it could not feasibly punish anger and lust (see Matt. 5:21-28). By defining sin “so radically,” Stuntz says, Jesus removed any justification for a legal regime that seeks to forbid all sin.

Second, Stuntz asserts that historically, “[l]egal prohibition of morally contested behavior has not been a successful strategy,” pointing to the 19th century fight over slavery. Slaveholders won many of the legal battles: the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened new territories to slavery, and the infamous Dred Scott decision, which opened all territories, even free states, to slavery. Yet in each case, legal victory led to political defeat for slaveholders. Kansas-Nebraska gave birth to the Republican Party, and Dred Scott spurred the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who would later write the Emancipation Proclamation.

Stuntz’s essential argument is that moralism is counterproductive and self-defeating, that unwelcome legal coercion is often a flashpoint and catalyst for political and social change. I don’t find this argument compelling, though. Worse, I do not think it’s fully faithful to the Gospel.

Jesus’s legal theory: moral seriousness about law

To begin, I think Stuntz gets Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 5 precisely wrong. When Jesus connects murder to anger and adultery to lust, He’s drawing on the familiar rabbinic concept of “drawing a hedge” or “building a fence” around our legal obligations. It’s wrong to murder, and to avoid committing that sin, we should also avoid things that, while not murder themselves, might lead to it—like anger. It’s wrong to cheat on your spouse, and to avoid committing that sin, we should also avoid things that, while not adultery themselves, might lead to it—like lust.

Most people grasp this concept intuitively. If you’re dieting, you shouldn’t keep cheesecake around the house. Seeing the cheesecake and having it around, of course, aren’t cheating, but they certainly make cheating more likely. So you toss it.

This principle of “building a fence” is familiar to modern jurists. In the First Amendment context, courts routinely strike down laws that, while not directly inhibiting speech, threaten to “chill” it, i.e., reduce the amount of speech or make people reluctant to express their views. Both Jesus in the first century and judges in the twenty-first are making the same jurisprudential move: they’re using a prophylactic rule to protect a more important legal principle.

If there’s a lesson from Matthew 5, it’s that we need more law, not less, at least when we’re protecting paramount interests like human life and marital faithfulness. And here’s the connection to abortion. If murdering a human being is wrong, the law should be such that we avoid even the possibility of wrongfully taking a life. So even if we’re not sure whether a fetus is a human person, we should “build a fence” —we should protect it. We shouldn’t draw our legal obligations so narrowly that we risk transgressing the moral principles at the heart of the law.2

Contrary to Stuntz, then, I read Jesus in Matthew 5 as demanding moral seriousness about law, not agnosticism and compromise.

Second, I don’t think Stuntz has the right read on 19th century history. Slaveholders and abolitionists both used legal coercion to achieve their social and economic goals. Abolitionists, after all, wanted to ban slavery and racial segregation and to back up those prohibitions with the force of law. And in the end, the abolitionists won. The aftermath of the Civil War brought the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude everywhere in the United States. It also spurred the enactment of civil rights laws that allowed private citizens to sue public officials for the deprivation of constitutional rights. The motivation for these laws was clear: “to restore peace and justice to the [South] through the subtle power of civil enforcement” (Wilson v. Garcia). It was law doing the powerful work of social change, even though the American public was still deeply divided about the relevant rights and wrongs.

It’s hard to read Stuntz’s insistence on legal agnosticism as anything other than a passive wait-and-see approach: “only after society comes around, then see to the necessary legal reforms. In the meantime, compromise.” But doesn’t that only prolong injustice? Aren’t some social ills simply too grave and too urgent?

Stuntz’s agnosticism about law creates a systematic bias that should trouble anyone with a conscience. If law should stand down whenever moral principles are publicly contested, then law will always give way whenever social wrongs can be recast as civil rights. That’s the logic that underlies both Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade—decisions that will live in infamy—and Stuntz’s approach has no real answer to them. His legal agnosticism would consistently favor a freedom to harm over a conscientious demand for justice as long as public opinion remains divided.

Christian activism: a signpost of God’s redemptive work

For Christians, the trouble with Stuntz’s legal agnosticism goes even deeper: it allows culture to dictate our moral witness. It counsels compromise whenever our calls for social change lack cultural currency. But that is not the role of the church in society. We are not called to be simply another social institution—negotiating, bargaining, lobbying, jostling for power and influence, brokering compromises to get “our way.” The church is something else entirely. It must be a signpost for the arriving Kingdom of God. It must be, in Eugene Peterson’s phrase, “a colony of heaven in the country of death.”

We must be ever bending society toward justice and the common good, recognizing that God is working in and through His people, and through history, to accomplish His redemptive purposes. In their social activism, Christians must align themselves with that work first, foremost, and finally, always “preparing the way” for God (Is. 40:3). Sometimes that will mean legal and political victory. But sometimes—and maybe more often—it will mean sounding a prophetic voice in the cultural wilderness.

When social desolation is all around us, our task as Christians is not to settle down in the desert. It’s to build a highway through it, to “make straight” a path for the renewing, restorative work of God in Christ. It’s no coincidence that the prophets speak of law and justice in this way:

Behold, a king will reign in righteousness,
and princes will rule in justice.
Each will be like a hiding place from the wind,
a shelter from the storm,
like streams of water in a dry place,
like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.

(Is. 32:1-2.)

As Christians, then, this should be our model for social activism: moral seriousness about the law, grounded in the work of Christ at the cross, pointing ever and always to the Kingdom He is quickly ushering in.

Christian legal theory, Part 2: Justice for the poor

Originally published Sep. 9, 2016

Thinking about law through a Christian lens means focusing on the poor. “[The Lord] has sent me to preach good news to the poor,” Jesus declares in Luke’s Gospel:

to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

(Luke 4:18-19.) These words not only launched Jesus’s ministry. They defined his mission. The poor, the oppressed, the stranger, and the outcast—the “least of these” (Matt. 25:40)—were closest to Jesus’s heart precisely because they were at the margins of society.

Centuries before Jesus, this is what the Prophets taught: that the measure of society is at its margins. Justice in the Kingdom of God isn’t about pious rituals, propping up the powerful, or even punishment of wrongdoers. Rather, Kingdom justice is about the poor. “Seek justice!” Isaiah enjoins. “Help the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Is. 1:17).

If “good news” for the poor is both the message of the Gospel and the measure of a just society, then it must be central to any Christian conception of law.

Sacrificial Justice

In his seminal essay “Christian Legal Theory,” late Harvard scholar (and evangelical Christian) William Stuntz sketches out the theoretical and theological underpinnings of a Gospel-centered theory of law. As I argued in Part 1 of this series (”Law, Gospel, and foolishness“), Stuntz’s essay holds two key insights for Christian legal theory.

• First, a Christian conception of law must be “faithful to the subversive implications of the Gospel.”

• Second, instead of searching the Gospel for a systematic theory of law, we ought to look for what Stuntz calls “Christian lines of critique, the sin-induced tendencies that run through all legal fields and all legal forms.”

Stuntz’s essay applies these insights in three areas: distributive justice, moralism, and humility. I’ll tackle moralism and humility in forthcoming posts.

When Stuntz talks about “distributive justice,” his focus is not on wealth redistribution policies, but on the dispensation of justice within the legal system, and particularly on the role of lawyers in securing justice for the poor.

And Stuntz’s assessment is a grim one. “Poor litigants do not reliably get fair outcomes, much less empathetic lawyers,” he writes. Public defender offices are understaffed and underfunded, leaving indigent criminal defendants with “overworked bureaucrats” rather than able advocates. And civil litigation is plagued by gamesmanship—tactics designed not to arrive at fair solutions but to exact unfair settlements. As Stuntz notes, these tactics “are especially problematic when used by rich litigants against poor ones.”

In our system, justice depends on what you can afford. A client might get a fair outcome if she can pay for a good lawyer. And good lawyers aren’t cheap. As every litigant quickly learns, in the American system of justice, your status depends on your means.

The Gospel flips this story on its head. Christianity teaches that each of us is a lawbreaker, each of us a guilty defendant who deserves punishment. And yet we are saved, not by our own merit or means, but simply by the mercy of God in Christ, the free gift of grace. Christ, our counselor and divine advocate, bought us with a price, not the other way around. In the Kingdom’s upside-down system of justice, it’s the Lawyer who buys—redeems—the client.

This, Stuntz says, is the real lesson the Gospel teaches when it comes to the legal system and the poor. In his view, a more fair legal system would focus less on “right legal doctrines” and more on “the right lawyers.” Stuntz calls for “a more Christian legal profession”—more lawyers willing to “defend the defenseless and befriend the friendless,” to sacrificially enter into the client’s distress, and to pursue justice with compassion and empathy.

By training his gaze on lawyers, Stuntz’s comments are intensely practical. Yet Stuntz pinpoints sacrifice as essential to doing justice for the poor, and that insight is radical. This notion of “sacrificial justice” is nowhere to be found in contemporary legal ethics. It’s rooted in the cross of Christ, not the classroom.

Focusing on the Poor

Stuntz’s conception of distributive justice is faithful to the essential elements of his legal theory, particularly his emphasis on relationships over rules and the subversive implications of the Gospel (on which, see Part 1). But there are other Christian lines of critique that Stuntz leaves unexplored.

The Gospel should sensitize us to the ways that society’s rules and systems work to oppress the poor—by reinforcing existing power structures and maintaining social stratification. Often this process isn’t deliberate; indeed, it may be rooted in good intentions. But sin taints everything, and Christians, of all people, should take notice.

There are so many areas that deserve our attention. Let me highlight just one: criminal history information.

With the increasing reliance on criminal law to punish even minor transgressions and technology that makes it easy and cheap to check a person’s background, a growing number of people—one in four American adults—find themselves with criminal records that are wide open to public inspection.1 Schools, employers, and landlords now routinely reject applicants who have even a hint of a criminal past—no matter how long ago it was, no matter the circumstances of the crime, no matter how much the person has changed. As a result, people with criminal histories face discrimination and barriers in education, employment, housing, and financial aid, institutions that are critical to socioeconomic mobility and reintegration into civic life.

Not surprisingly, this problem disproportionately affects the poor and people of color, reinforcing a cycle of poverty and recidivism. Simply put, if a person has no legitimate options because of her criminal past, she’s more likely to resort to crime (again) as a way to provide for herself and her family.

As advocates for the poor, Christians should be critical of this system. Just as God has wiped the slate clean for us and remembers our “lawless deeds no more” (Heb. 10:17), so we should work to ensure that a person’s past mistakes don’t haunt him forever. Here are three ideas:

• Christian schools, employers, and landlords can give people with criminal histories a second look and a chance to talk frankly about their past.2

• Support legislative efforts that allow more people to expunge or seal their criminal records, which prevents the information from appearing on a background check.

• Advocate legal reforms that protect employers from liability for hiring people with criminal backgrounds, at least where the crime has no real bearing on the job.

Any legal theory, to call itself Christian, must have justice for the poor at its heart. Whether it’s practicing law sacrificially or pursuing legal reforms that give people a second chance, the Gospel reminds us that our social and spiritual destinies are intimately tied to how we treat the “least” among us.

Much has changed in the nine years since I wrote these essays, but they stand up pretty well, so I’m going to publish them in three parts here. My views have changed on a few things, so I’m adding editorial footnotes to clarify, or in some cases contradict, my then-expressed views. Here’s the first of the three.

Radical Christian legal theory, Part 1: Law, Gospel, and foolishness

Originally published Aug. 20, 2016

It’s not often one can say a law review article affected them profoundly. But for me, that’s true of “Christian Legal Theory” by the late Harvard scholar William Stuntz.

This post is the first in a series on Stuntz’s article. My goal: to illuminate Stuntz’s ideas for a broader audience, to shed some light on the question that Stuntz poses in his opening sentence: “Why should anyone think about law in Christian terms?”

Law, Gospel, and Foolishness

The impetus for Stuntz’s piece is Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought, a series of law professor essays on the intersection of Christian thought and American legal theory. Stuntz spends time summarizing and critiquing the essays, which cover a broad range of topics, from the Christian roots of liberal thought to Christian perspectives on— and defenses of—the issues of the day: racial equality, feminism, environmentalism, economics, criminal justice, and even contracts, torts, and legal ethics.

Ultimately, Stuntz finds Christian Perspectives as a whole “moderate and familiar,” “comfortable,” and “ordinary.” “If this book is a fair gauge of the effect serious Christians might have on legal thought,” Stuntz writes, “those who like legal thought just as it is needn’t worry.”

I want to reserve my own judgment on the book, but Stuntz’s critique is astringent, and for good reason. The Apostle Paul taught that the Gospel is “unto the Greeks, foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23). It is at odds with the wisdom of the world. (Eugene Peterson calls it “the seeming absurdity of God.”) But as Stuntz dryly observes, anyone reading Christian Perspectives “might be excused for wondering why the transcendent God seems to think like a typical American law professor.”

The trouble with many of the book’s essays is that they start in the wrong place. They begin with a particular cause du jour, like racism or sexism, and work their way backwards, hoping to show that Christian thought is compatible with contemporary legal perspectives. The essayist’s task is less a Christian lens on law, and more a legal lens on Christianity.

But Christian thought shouldn’t be so mainstream. True to itself, the Gospel is upside-down religion. As Stuntz notes, Christ in his teachings “is constantly reversing the natural order of things, saying that the last shall be first and the first last, that those who lose their lives will save them (and vice versa).” If subversion of the natural order lies at the core of the Gospel, it should also be at the center of any Christian perspective on law.1

That intuition is both Stuntz’s central insight and the key driver of his critique of Christian Perspectives. So in his essay, Stuntz sets about to divine first principles and lay the groundwork for a Christ-centered understanding of law, one that’s faithful to the subversive implications of the Gospel. The result is a different kind of Christian legal theory, what Stuntz calls radical Christian legal theory.

Radical Christian Legal Theory

To be fair, Stuntz doesn’t see himself as divining first principles, but as taking disparate strands of Christian thought and weaving them into a common legal-ethical fabric. For him, any legal theory that calls itself “Christian” must take into account at least four ideas:

[Note: I’ve reformulated and stylized these, but they are faithful to Stuntz’s thought.]

1. Ethical theism: Underpinning all of Christian thought is the belief that God has an abiding interest in man’s everyday conduct and thus “cares deeply about law and the moral messages it sends.”

2. The taint of sin: Because sin affects everything we do, it should induce caution and uncertainty—not about God, but about ourselves, our motivations, and our perceptions.

3. Relationships over rules: The emphasis of Christianity is on right relationships, not rules.

4. Christ-centered radicalism: In pointing to a different reality, a different Kingdom, and a different King, the Gospel turns the systems of the world on their head, law included.

What does all this mean for legal theory? Stuntz begins to sketch out the implications.

Most important is Stuntz’s suggestion that there really is no Christian legal theory at all: “instead of looking for the Christian theory of contracts or criminal law or anything else,” he writes, “we ought to be looking for the Christian lines of critique, the sin-induced tendencies that run through all legal fields and all legal forms.”

That insight really is radical because it works against the human tendency to systematize, a tendency that (perhaps paradoxically) affects lawyers and theologians more than most. Indeed, if there is a moral-legal thrust to the Gospel, it is anti-systematic. Christianity, as Stuntz puts it, “embraces no one theory but criticizes all.” It is ever skeptical of the way that rules and systems—the domain of law itself—tend to reflect our self-interest and the entrenchment of power.2

Stuntz’s emphasis on critique over theory is the key that unlocks the rest of his essay, and he works out its implications in three areas: distributive justice (i.e., special concern for the poor), moralism, and humility. I plan to explore each of these in subsequent posts.

Redeeming Law

A parting thought on the theological implications of Stuntz’s essay. At the root of “Christian Legal Theory” is the intuition that the Kingdom of God and the message of the Gospel are for the here-and-now. As Christ taught us to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Even to speak of a Christian perspective on law is to believe that God is acutely concerned not only with human actions, but also with how those actions point to a deeper reality, the reality of a Kingdom breaking through.

Between these two poles lies the moral agenda of Christian people: the restoration of right relationships over against the ubiquitous taint of sin (starting with our own). Law has an important role to play in this project, but only if it remains oriented toward the grace-filled, redemptive work of Christ.

AI and emerging tech are promising vehicles for religious expression. But that promise is jeopardized when regulations designed to address misuse—like the spread of misinformation or algorithmic bias—fail to account for the unique needs of religious groups. Policymakers must ensure that new technology regulations don’t diminish fundamental rights.

A Legacy of Freedom: The First Amendment and Technology

In every generation, advancing technology tests the boundaries of the First Amendment. In the early twentieth century, it was motion pictures. The Supreme Court held in 1915 that motion pictures were not a form of protected expression; they were “a business, pure and simple” and “not to be regarded … as part of the press.”

That decision stood until 1952. In Burstyn v. Wilson, the Court considered a New York statute that outlawed films deemed “sacrilegious” by state-appointed censors. At issue was The Miracle, an Italian film about a peasant girl who, after being seduced by a man she believed to be St. Joseph, gives birth to a son she believes is the Christchild. New York banned the film, but the Supreme Court reversed, rejecting the argument that motion pictures were a unique “evil” that lay beyond First Amendment protection. While new means of communication may present their own “peculiar problems,” the Court said, “the basic principles of freedom of speech and the press … do not vary.” Those principles “make freedom of expression the rule,” not the exception.

The very text of the First Amendment embodies this rule. When the founding generation secured protection for the freedom of both “speech” and “press,” they were protecting not only the content of ideas but also the means of communicating them. The printing press was, after all, the mass communication technology of the day.

Today, a similar debate is playing out with AI. Some fear its ability to supercharge misinformation or enable harmful practices, prompting a surge in regulation. California’s recent law targeting “deceptive” AI-generated political content is one such example. The law was swiftly blocked for violating the First Amendment, highlighting that even in the face of new technologies, free speech principles don’t change.

The Promise and Peril of Data Privacy Laws

Nowhere is the tension between regulation and freedom more evident than in the realm of data privacy. Legislators in at least 19 states have enacted laws restricting how organizations collect, process, and share personal data. While these laws aim to protect individuals, they create unique challenges for religious organizations that increasingly depend on data.

Under many data privacy laws, the simple act of outreach—communicating with a data subject—may require explicit, advance consent. Activities like sharing data between ministries or collaborating on outreach campaigns now risk violating privacy laws unless strict consent procedures are followed. Ministries and denominations with large databases face heightened regulatory burdens, particularly for data that relates to the religious beliefs of members, donors, and congregants.

New data privacy rules unintentionally single out religious organizations and their data for disfavored treatment. This complicates their operations and raises serious constitutional questions about religious exercise and speech.

The stakes are high. If religious organizations cannot freely communicate with their constituents or collaborate with other ministries due to regulatory hurdles, their missions are severely hindered. To avoid compliance costs and liability, they may steer clear of certain practices altogether. This chilling effect is exactly the harm the First Amendment seeks to prevent.

The Double-Edged Sword of AI Regulation

Beyond data privacy, the regulation of AI itself presents new challenges. Colorado’s law banning “algorithmic discrimination” is a case in point. The law prohibits AI systems from making decisions in areas like hiring, housing, and education that result in differential treatment based on protected characteristics such as race, religion, or gender. While well-intentioned, the law could inadvertently entangle religious organizations in compliance battles. Other states are considering similar laws.

We need balanced regulation that addresses the legitimate potential harms of AI while respecting religious freedom. As faith-based organizations increasingly adopt tools like AI chatbots for evangelism, prayer, and counseling, new legal questions arise: Is expression generated by a chatbot a form of protected speech? Just as pressing, who bears responsibility if an AI system generates biased, inaccurate, or harm-inducing responses?

These are uncharted waters. Legislators and courts will need to sort through the implications, but religious organizations must contend with the risks now. Missteps create legal exposure, operational challenges, reputational damage, and even theological dilemmas.

Harnessing AI for Good

Despite the risks, AI’s potential is vast. AI-driven tools are already accelerating scientific discovery, and similar breakthroughs are happening in religious contexts. AI-powered Bible translation is making Scripture accessible to more people worldwide, while religious chatbots are helping individuals explore questions about faith.

This gets to another important constitutional principle. The First Amendment not only protects a speaker’s right to convey information—it also protects a listener’s right to receive it. More generally, the First Amendment protects the “free flow” of information and ideas, something the Supreme Court has called “essential” in a democratic society. The First Amendment thus secures more than an individual right to speech. It also functions as structural safeguard for the marketplace of ideas—regardless of who’s doing the speaking or listening. Under this view, any technology capable of contributing to humanity’s common stock of information is within the ambit of First Amendment protection.

Where freedom of expression is the rule, AI is no exception. Yet these advancements are possible only if speakers (religious and otherwise) can freely harness AI without fear of regulatory overreach. Just as the printing press fueled the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution—and thus gave rise to the First Amendment itself—and just as the internet democratized access to knowledge, AI has the potential to revolutionize how humanity accesses, organizes, and discovers information. For religious groups, innovative technologies are an opportunity to spread their message and contribute to the broader quest for knowledge, truth, and ultimate meaning.

A Call for Thoughtful Regulation

At the intersection of emerging technology and constitutional freedoms, lawmakers must strike a careful balance. Overregulation risks stifling innovation and undermining rights, while underregulation leaves room for misuse and harm. Beyond basic free speech principles, policymakers must consider the unique needs and roles of religious organizations. New laws should both promote technological progress and protect core constitutional rights.

Existing laws on fraud, defamation, and discrimination are sufficient to address some of the harms associated with AI and data misuse. Where new regulations are necessary, they must be narrowly tailored to avoid infringing free speech and religious exercise.

Through centuries of technological change—from the printing press to motion pictures to the internet—the First Amendment has safeguarded Americans’ right to expressive and religious freedom. It can do so again in the age of AI. By reaffirming its principles, we can ensure that innovation and freedom go hand in hand—that technology serves not as a threat to faith and expression, but as another tool for human flourishing.

The literal sense of religious liberty, then, is the freedom to be bound, or more precisely, freedom from one set of constraints in order to be bound to another. It is a tethered liberty—liberty that involves an allegiance. At its root, it is not freedom from constraint but freedom for the purpose of constraint. It is the freedom to honor one’s highest loyalties and fulfill one’s deepest moral obligations.

In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance, James Madison expounded on the political implications of the religious liberty paradox. Because man’s ultimate duty is to God, Madison wrote, every other obligation becomes relativized. So, even when man enters society and submits himself to civil government, he does so “with a reservation of his duty”—a “saving of his allegiance”—to God.

Religious liberty, in the Madisonian sense, is a reservation of one’s ultimate allegiance. It is freedom to do not what one wants but what one ought. It is never self-referential, never liberty for its own sake. Religious liberty has a telos. Being bound to a higher sovereign (religio) necessarily requires freedom from lesser authorities (libertas). This is the essence of religious liberty: freedom for the sake of something more deeply binding.

The paradox is vividly illustrated in the fifth chapter of the book of Exodus. This biblical passage, recounting Moses and Aaron’s initial appearance before Pharaoh, contains history’s first recorded demands for religious liberty.

Moses, having been called by God to deliver the Israelites from slavery, stands before Egypt’s king and says: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” Pharaoh refuses, and Moses reasserts the demand, though phrased differently: “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” This time, Pharaoh not only refuses but retaliates against the Israelites, increasing their workload and punishments.

Two aspects of Moses’s demands deserve attention. First, the demands for freedom are specifically tied to religious obligation: “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to [God] in the wilderness,’” or later, “that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.” These are not demands for political liberty as such. Moses does not say, “Let my people go, that they may establish their own form of government.” This is not a Jeffersonian call for national independence. While national sovereignty is in Israel’s future, here in Exodus 5, freedom isn’t justified on those grounds. Rather, it is tethered to religious worship.

Second, in Exodus 5, the conception of religious liberty is corporate, not individual. Moses demands that an entire people be set free in order to worship in the way God has commanded. Properly conceived, religion is always a corporate enterprise. It binds a people together, binds them to their God, and commits them to a particular way of life. Religious liberty is congruent to these ends. It is more than simply an individual right to religious self-expression. Rather, libertas for the sake of religio means the freedom to bind oneself to a community and to a set of obligations that are larger than and beyond oneself.

Thus far, we have treated Moses’s demands monolithically, but they are not the same. Reflecting on their differences yields further insights.

Rewind a couple of chapters. In Exodus 3, God gives Moses precise instructions on how to approach Pharaoh and what to say: “You and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God’” (3:18).

Yet Moses fudges things a bit. When he goes to Pharaoh in Exodus 5, he doesn’t take the elders of Israel with him; only his brother Aaron accompanies him. His opening demand identifies the deity as “The Lord, the God of Israel” rather than “the God of the Hebrews.” The phrase “Let my people go” is a Mosaic innovation. And he initially portrays the religious obligation as absolute and unlimited rather than a simple three-day journey.

By contrast, Moses’s second demand hews more closely to God’s instructions. And herein lies a puzzle. Moses’s second demand seems far more modest than his first one. It begins with “please.” It seeks a time-limited religious accommodation. And Moses even appends “lest [God] fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword,” perhaps appealing to Pharaoh’s self-interest in productive labor. Yet it is the second demand that sets Pharaoh off. Pharaoh responds to Moses’s first demand with a simple, almost bored refusal. He responds to the second with furious retaliation.

Why? Why does the seemingly more modest demand infuriate Pharaoh so?

The answer lies, I believe, in Moses’s verbal pivot from the “God of Israel” to the “God of the Hebrews.” The latter implies a bolder political claim, even a radical one.

To understand why, put yourself in the ancient Egyptian mind. Pharaoh was the god-king—the living embodiment of Egypt’s gods, maintainer of cosmic order, the source and summit of civic and spiritual life. No surprise, then, that Moses’s initial appeal to “the Lord, the God of Israel” landed flat. There was no such deity in the Egyptian pantheon. At best, Moses was relying on some foreign, local god with no power in Egypt. It was perfectly rational for Pharaoh to respond as he did: “I do not know this god. I do not answer to him.” One can imagine a dismissive wave of the pharaonic hand.

But when Moses says—as God had instructed him to say—that “the God of the Hebrews has met with us,” that was something different. In the original language, the key word here, “Hebrews,” is Ivri. The literal sense is the “people from beyond” or the “people who cross over.” This is not some local deity, Moses is suddenly saying. This is a God who crosses jurisdictional boundaries, who watches over His people wherever they may be found. A God unconstrained by geographic limits must stand above the local Egyptian pantheon. Moses’s second demand is positing a different kind of God—a God of gods, a God over all.

Pharaoh is going to learn this lesson the hard way through the experience of the plagues, each of which is designed to reverse some aspect of Egyptian cosmology and demonstrate the supremacy of Israel’s God. As Moses’s father-in-law Jethro will later proclaim, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Ex. 18:11).

Yet before any of this occurs, here in Exodus 5, Pharaoh instantly grasps the implications of Moses’s second demand. A localized and distant “God of Israel” is one thing. But a transcendent and present “God of the Hebrews” is quite another. Pharaoh’s reaction is angry, swift, and punitive.

This brings us to a third lesson this passage teaches: by its very nature, religious liberty limits the power of the sovereign. Pharaoh thought of his own power as both divinely ordained and absolute, subject only to the geographical limits over which he could extend it. Yet in Exodus 5, Moses proclaims a God who transcends all of that. When Moses says, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us,” he is not simply upending the foundations of Egyptian political order. He is forever reframing the way human beings will think about political order at all. If indeed there is a God who stands above every human authority, then that God is worthy of one’s ultimate allegiance—an allegiance higher and more fundamental than human authority can ever command.

It would have been easy for Pharaoh to permit Israel a short religious festival. Yet to grant this specific demand meant conceding a more general principle: it meant accepting inherent limits on pharaonic authority. It meant relativizing his rule. This, Pharaoh was unwilling to do. As the rest of Exodus unfolds, it’s clear this was God’s plan all along: Pharaoh’s recalcitrance becomes the very opening God needs to demonstrate his cosmic supremacy.

Pharaoh may be the first ruler in history to bristle at divine limits on his earthly power, but he will not be the last. Nearly every king, Caesar, governor, and legislator after him will chafe at the demand for religious liberty in much the same way. In a sense, every contest over religious liberty is downstream of the showdown between Moses and Pharaoh in Exodus 5.

This brings us back to Madison. What is remarkable about the United States—what is perhaps most distinctive about our constitutional republic—is that the very men who, at the founding moment, held political authority not only acknowledged limits to that authority but actually locked them in. Constitutional protection of religious liberty supplies the paradigmatic example.

Attend to Madison’s reasoning in Memorial and Remonstrance and it is impossible not to hear the Mosaic echo: “[Religious] duty is precedent … to the claims of Civil Society,” Madison asserts, because religious man is bound to something that transcends political authority. In Madison’s telling, we owe ultimate allegiance to a “Universal Sovereign.”

Pharaoh was presented with this same argument and couldn’t accept it. America’s founders, by contrast, made it a cornerstone of our system of government.

• The responsibilities of self-government

• Civic virtue

• Political equality

• Representative democracy

• Limited government

• Respect for minority rights, including religious freedom and free speech.

These are essential features of our constitutional republic—the conceptual and institutional structures on which our law and political culture are built. Without them, the United States would not be what it is. And without an understanding of them, the American people can neither sustain their republican experiment nor carry it forward.

The trouble is, while the institutions of our national civic life require a particular kind of citizen, they do not themselves create such persons. Nor should they be expected to. They were not designed that way. As Yuval Levin puts it in his recent book American Covenant:

“Our politics requires a kind of person it does not produce by itself, and so it must depend on other institutions of our society to produce that person.”

These other institutions include the family, community, religious tradition, and other civic and educational institutions. (Whether these institutions are today fulfilling that responsibility is a separate, albeit crucial, question.)

To understand American political institutions, the natural starting point is of course the Constitution itself. It’s a fair bet that most Americans haven’t ever read the document in full. They should. It’s only about 4,400 words—7,500 if you count all 27 amendments. (When I taught constitutional law and First Amendment to college undergrads, I gave them all a free copy of the Constitution, and their first reading assignment was to read the thing cover to cover.)

But the Constitution’s meaning isn’t always self-evident or intuitive. To truly understand it, one must know the problems it aimed to solve, the debates it did (and did not) resolve, and the philosophical commitments that drove it. One must know something about the political culture in which it arose.

Almost from the beginning, Americans have looked to The Federalist—sometimes called The Federalist Papers—to better understand their National Charter. These were a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the pseudonym “Publius” and published in various newspapers, primarily in New York, between October 1787 and May 1788. Their purpose was to advocate for ratification of the new Constitution—sometimes called the “Plan of the Convention”—and to explain, almost line by line, the intent behind its provisions.

The Federalist in a Year

Constitutional lawyer though I am, and despite fancying myself a student of Madison’s thought in particular, I have never actually read all of The Federalist. I’ve read several of the essays in depth; I’ve dipped into various others; but I’ve never read them all.

In 2025, I intend to remedy the defect. Call it “The Federalist in a Year.” At two essays a week, I would be done by October, but I plan to read faster than that.

Of course, the challenge isn’t just to read the essays, but to absorb and be shaped by them. I tend to journal when I read, taking notes, noting quotes. But I plan to do something a little extra. For each essay, I’ll compose a small poem to summarize and help me remember what it’s about. The poems won’t always follow the same format. Some iambic pentameter here, a limerick or haiku there.

Here’s what I cobbled together for Federalist No. 1, which is Hamilton’s general introduction to the essays:

Federalist No. 1

The proposed Constitution is a test of our people
Whether history will repeat or change its course—
May government be founded on reflection and choice,
Or be subject always to accident and force?

Views will be mixed. Be guided by truth.
(Everyone’s tainted by their own ambition.)
Let me lay my own cards on the table:
The necessity of Union is my highest conviction.

On two things does good government depend:
Energy (the means) and Liberty (the end).

A Tradition of Federalist Poetry

As it turns out, what might be called “Federalist poetry” has a venerable history. Here’s the last stanza of “Our Liberty Tree: A Federal Song” published in the Massachusetts Centinel on December 29, 1787:

Then from east to the west let our Patriots convene,
Determin’d their country to free,
Our Constitution confirm—it firmly shall fix,
Its idol—our Liberty Tree.

Or consider stanza IV of “The Fabrick of Freedom,” published on March 8, 1788, with echoes of Madison’s Federalist No. 10:

Thus is our constitution rear’d,
On Freedom Strength and Peace;
By Virtue lov’d, by Faction fear’d,
For faction’s self must cease.
Contented now we’ll happy live,
While Industry and Trade shall thrive.

Finally, there is what might be my personal favorite: “The New Constitution: A Song.” It’s a kind of constitutional Screwtape Letters. Published in the Virginia Herald on January 10, 1788, the poem envisions Satan and his minions—alarmed that “[a] wonder, a good constitution” has “lately appeared”—stalking about, sowing chaos and deception to defeat the project. The poet urges his countrymen to resist the devilish plot:

Then let each honest man
Do the best that he can,
And establish a firm resolution,
All their schemes to oppose,
And to harrass the foes,
Of this happy and good constitution:

I hope to publish insights from my readings of The Federalist—and more poems—as the year progresses.

Later, the same angel appears to a young woman with stunning news: she, though a virgin, will bear a son. The woman also asks, “How…?” For her, the angel offers a candid explanation and assures her that “nothing will be impossible for God.”

Both the old man and the young woman seek explanation for a miracle. Yet the old man is seemingly punished for his question, while the young woman isn’t. Why?

These stories are part of the first chapter of Luke, where the angel Gabriel announces the births of John the Baptist and Jesus to their parents, Zechariah and Mary, respectively. Luke doesn’t tell us why the angel responds differently to each. We are left searching the text for clues.

Old Man vs. Young Woman

The most obvious distinction between the two annunciation stories lies in the identity of the recipients. The man Zechariah is “advanced in years” and his wife Elizabeth is past childbearing age, while the woman Mary is young, newly betrothed to Joseph, and still a virgin.

Perhaps God favors youth over old age, or women over men, or both. Thus is Zechariah punished for asking “How?” while Mary is not.

This explanation is too superficial to be satisfying. Identity-based favoritism might sync with modern notions of “equity and inclusion” or “affirmative action,” but nothing in Luke’s text or in the biblical tradition suggests that is what’s going on here. We have to go deeper.

The Nature of the Question: A Demand for Personal Assurance vs. Humble Faith

Both Zechariah and Mary seek an explanation for the miracle (“How…?”), but their questions are not the same. When the angel announces the birth of John, Zechariah points to the biological impossibility—Elizabeth is old—and he asks, “How shall I know this?” Mary also highlights biological impossibility—“I am a virgin,” she reminds the angel—but she asks a different question: “How will this be?”

We might reflect on these questions and what they tell us about the mindsets of the questioners. Zechariah’s question differs from Mary’s in at least two ways: it is self-focused and it is knowledge-centric. “How shall I know?” he asks. Zechariah wants personal assurance of the miracle, an evidential guarantee, something he can use to push back against the doubters who will inevitably question the veracity of his account. Zechariah seems more worried about his reputation in the community than awed by the angelic announcement.

Mary’s question, by contrast, is not a demand for personal assurance. It is a question of humble faith: “How will this be?” Mary seems unconcerned with herself and her reputation—though as an unmarried pregnant woman, she had more to lose than Zechariah. She accepts that the miracle “will be,” yet is courageous enough to ask “How?” The purity of her faith is underscored in her final words to the angel: “I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

The Nature of the Miracle: Old vs. New

Perhaps the different nature of the two miracles explains the angel’s divergent responses. The miracle announced to Zechariah fits a biblical pattern. Throughout the Bible, God repeatedly “opens the womb” of childless women, including the 90-year-old Sarah, and blesses them with children. So, while it’s surely a miracle that Zechariah’s elderly wife will bear a son, it is a “predictable miracle,” so to speak. It’s the sort of thing God has done before.

But the miracle announced to Mary is something new. It breaks the mold. There’s no biblical precedent for a virgin conceiving a child. It’s an unpredictable miracle, the sort of thing God had never done before.

Zechariah, a man steeped in biblical tradition, receives the easier announcement, yet he struggles with belief. Of all people, he should have “known.” He didn’t need further assurance. Mary, on the other hand, receives the more difficult announcement. Her miracle was harder to believe in, yet her instinct is to respond in faith rather than doubt.

Religious Ritualism vs. Authentic Faith

A final possibility is that all of the above dichotomies are in play, that Luke is using a complex layering of contrasts to point to deeper truths in the story as a whole. Luke’s first chapter recalls an older biblical story: that of the Eli the priest’s encounter with Hannah, a prayerful mother-to-be, in 1 Samuel 1.

The childless Hannah is at the temple of the Lord in Shiloh, weeping bitterly and praying for a son. She prays silently “in her heart”—“only her lips moved”—but Eli, who is eavesdropping nearby, doesn’t realize it. He thinks she’s drunk and openly scolds her.

How is it that Eli—a religious official whose entire existence is devoted to divine service—cannot recognize the sincerity and pathos of Hannah’s prayer? His lifelong focus on religious ritual has so blinded him to authentic faith that he can no longer distinguish a heartfelt petition from a drunkard’s babble.

But God knows the difference. He hears Hannah’s prayer and blesses her with a son. Eli, meanwhile, will lose his sons and his own life, his entire spiritual legacy cut off.

Authentic faith over religious ritual is a key theme of First Samuel, and Luke picks this up. At one level, he wants us to see the parallels between Hannah and Mary—their two songs of praise are remarkably similar, for example—and between Eli and Zechariah. Luke stresses Zechariah’s role as priest, carefully noting that his encounter with the angel occurs inside the temple—the most holy place on earth. Here, God’s presence dwelt in a kind of ongoing, miraculous encounter of the divine and the human. To stand in the temple was to stand in the presence of God. This is exactly the angel’s point in responding to Zechariah’s question: “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God.”

It’s as if the angel is saying, “Look where we are, man! This is the place where heaven meets earth. It’s literally an embodied miracle. And you have the audacity to ask how?!” As with Eli, a life of religious ritual has blinded Zechariah to authentic faith. His physical muteness becomes a real-life manifestation of his spiritual blindness.

But there’s more to this story, because Luke also wants us to see that Zechariah is not like Eli. We’re told that Zechariah and Elizabeth are both “righteous before God” and “blameless”—accolades never applied to Eli in First Samuel. In other words, Zechariah is a person of authentic faith. In that sense, he is actually more like Hannah.

Herein lies the deeper symbolic significance of Zechariah’s sudden inability to speak, for in his muteness, he will recapitulate Hannah’s story. Hannah’s silent prayer both expresses her genuine faith and presages a divine blessing: soon after, she will bear a son and burst forth in song. “My horn is exalted in the Lord … because I rejoice in your salvation,” her opening lines declare (1 Samuel 2:1).

In the same way, unable to speak, Zechariah would have been disqualified from performing many of his priestly rituals. Over several months, he could do nothing but pray silently in his heart, with only his lips moving. He was, in other words, more penitent than priest—more Hannah than Eli. It would have been a constant reminder to Zechariah of what genuine faith in God really is. And his silent prayers will also presage divine blessing: soon, Zechariah’s wife will bear a son and he, too, will burst forth in song: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he … has raised up a horn of salvation for us,” his opening lines declare (Luke 1:68).

The parallels here are impossible to miss. Thus understood, the angelic response to Zechariah isn’t punishment at all. It is a chastening blessing, a means of reminding Zechariah that God’s ultimate concern is with the state of our hearts and not the rectitude of our rituals.

But Luke’s complex narrative also wants us to see that God’s salvation, in the newborn Messiah, is good news for everyone: old and young, priest and penitent, doubter and believer. As Zechariah himself sings:

[T]he sunrise shall visit us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Amen ve’amen. Merry Christmas.

Last week I was in Palm Beach and had the privilege of visiting Raptis Rare Books. Its beautiful gallery space is filled with books—rare, signed, some beautifully rebound—tucked into floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves and cabinets. One of the most expensive items on offer is a first-edition Hobbit inscribed by the author, priced at $475,000. For more than double that price, you can own an original (one of only two) of George Washington’s 1775 commission from the Continental Congress appointing him Commander in Chief of the United Colonies.

My ambitions were far more modest. I purchased a 35th anniversary edition of Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, original dust jacket, inscribed by the author. It’s one of the cleverest children’s stories you’ll ever read and equally entertaining for adults.

In the spirit of my rare book digression comes this week’s Two Things.

(1) Smells Like Teen Mozart

The Strad reports that a string trio dated to Mozart’s early teenage years has been rediscovered in a library in Leipzig, Germany:

A previously unknown string trio from Mozart’s early years has been discovered in the archives of the music library of the Leipzig Municipal Libraries, according to a statement from the institution, one of the largest public music libraries in Germany.

Consisting of seven miniature movements for two violins and bass (including two minuets) and lasting a total of some twelve minutes, the C major trio ‘is thought to have been written in the mid to late 1760s’, the researchers posit – likely during the composer’s earliest teenage years and pre-dating his first visit to Italy in 1769….

The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the Trio specially for her….

(Thanks to Brad Hale for the pointer to this story.) The Strad goes on to report that the musical piece, which has been named Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, “received its much-belated modern premiere on 19 September 2024 in Mozart’s native Salzburg.” This was followed “by the German premiere at Leipzig Opera on 21 September, with Vincent and David Geer playing the violin parts and Elisabeth Zimmermann on cello.” Watch it here and listen to the end, where the piece becomes even more lively and light-hearted:

(2) Most ancient Hebrew book, discovered in Afghan cave

The Free Press has this one:

In 2019 a curator from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and an elderly scholar from Jerusalem were at work on an odd manuscript: a pocket-sized Hebrew book of uncertain age and origin….

Some of the pages contained a previously unknown poem for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. On one page, an untrained scribe, perhaps a child practicing lessons, wrote out the Hebrew alphabet. Other pages had a version of the Haggadah, the text read by Jewish families at the festive Passover meal.

The Jerusalem scholar, Malachi Beit-Arié, had a hunch that the book’s story was other, and older, than it seemed…. When the radiometric results finally came back from the lab, they proved him right: The parchment dated to between 660 and 780 CE. This result didn’t mean a minor chronological adjustment. It meant that the mysterious little book had just been catapulted into a different league of antiquities.

The new date meant that the text of the Passover Haggadah wasn’t just ancient—it was the most ancient known to scholars. The book predated the first standardized Jewish siddur, or prayer book, by more than a century. The research team was holding, in fact, the oldest bound Hebrew book ever discovered.

Just as remarkable as the age of the codex is where it was found:

The book’s true place of origin, it seemed, was not Cairo, or Babylon, as some scholars thought, but Bamiyan, in the Hindu Kush 80 miles northwest of Kabul.

Bamiyan served for centuries as a stop along the great east-west trading routes known collectively as the Silk Road, and unlikely as this may seem now, Jews once lived here as a minority, not among Muslims but among Buddhists. At the same time the book was made by artisans cutting, folding, and binding animal skins in the 700s CE, Islam was surging across the region from Arabia, but had yet to conquer these mountains.

It goes on display, starting tomorrow, at the Museum of the Bible.

Other Things

• Mark your calendars for Wednesday, October 30, at 6:00 p.m., when Dr. Brad Hale delivers a lecture on C.S. Lewis as part of a First Pres lecture series.

• Scholars continue to “virtually unwrap” ancient scrolls using X-ray tomography and computer vision. A trove of charred scrolls at Herculaneum (near Pompei) is a gold mine.

• Hezbollah has begun targeting Nazareth and Galilee, “threatening countless holy places.” Cue the Christian condemnations? Not so much. Leftist Anglican clerics still think the problem is … (do I need to complete this sentence?).

Hope to see you Friday.

I write on September 11, 2024, the 23rd anniversary of that horrific day that changed the world, and the United States’ relationship to it, in ways that history is still unfolding. The anniversary this year comes on the heels of Hamas’s despicable murder of six hostages, including an American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin (may their memories be a blessing). That tragic event deserved more elevation in the public conscience, but it was quickly overshadowed by Tucker Carlson’s interview of a historian (so-called) sounding in historical revisionism, Holocaust denialism, and Nazi apologetics. Then there was last night’s presidential debate, in which we gained little additional insight on either candidate except perhaps that Vice President Harris is capable of clearing the exceedingly low bar that has been set for her.

And onward we march through the increasingly chaotic political present, which leaves me groping for waymarkers, the sort of “You Are Here” analyses that offer historical perspective and situate us in the moment and the place we find ourselves. I try not to “do politics” in this newsletter, but I do seek to understand the cultural, civilizational undercurrents that undergird our politics. So, this week’s Two Things is really many things grouped under two headings.

(1) 10/7, 9/11, and WW2

Today, The Free Press reprints, under the title “What September 11 Revealed,” a November 2001 essay by Jonathan Rosen, prefaced with the bracing observation: “Today it is possible to see the outline of the October 7 massacre nested in the mass murders of September 11, and to recognize, in the justifications and celebration of October 7, the portents of future barbarism.”

Stretching further back, the same outlet last week published an essay by (actual) WW2 historian Niall Ferguson on “The Return of Anti-History,” refuting in detail the claims of Tucker’s interviewee:

I have spent most of my adult life writing history books, most of them addressing in one way or another what still seem to me among the central questions of modern history: Why did the Germans, who in the 1920s appeared to be the most scientifically and culturally advanced people in the world, fall under the spell of Adolf Hitler and perpetrate the most odious crime of all: industrialized genocide? Why did the economic and intellectual success of the Jews after their nineteenth-century emancipation arouse such hatred? And why did the British Empire, for all its flaws, not succumb to the seemingly irresistible force of Nazism in 1940?

“I have never argued that Churchill was a saint,” Ferguson continues, but he “was the savior of Western civilization. Had he not stiffened British resolve … the repulsive, blood-drenched empire that was the Third Reich might conceivably have won the war.” And yet Ferguson cannot help but fear for the future:

It is surely the epitome of professional failure to have spent more than three decades writing, teaching, and speaking about these matters, and to have achieved so little that a nasty little Nazi apologist like Darryl Cooper can win an audience of millions. But that is apparently what happens when podcasts drive out books and anti-history drives out history.

(2) The West’s Civilizational Moment

At Providence, Robert Nicholson begins a fresh look at Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, a book whose last sentence in 1996 foretold that, “[i]n the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.” It was an idea widely panned at the time but which, Nicholson argues, history is bearing out:

To see civilizationally is to see the currents, not the waves. And with threats mounting on every side, we can’t afford to do otherwise. The Russia-Ukraine war; the Israel-Iran conflict; the rise of China; the self-immolation of the Islamic world; the nativist-migrant struggle in Europe; the identity crisis here in the US—in all these cases, a civilizational analysis does more than merely explain. Applied to real situations, it offers the basis for better policy.

Nicholson extends his analysis in a second installment at Providence, critiquing Netanyahu’s July 24 speech to Congress in which he called the Israel-Iran war “not a clash of civilizations” but “a clash between barbarism and civilization.” For Nicholson, this is a “small erro[r] in perception” that promises “huge strategic mistakes.” The aftermath of 9/11 is a case in point:

The simple awareness that bin Laden’s call for jihad against “crusaders and Zionists” was anything but fringe, being grounded in mainstream Islamic theology and popular among regular Muslims, would have helped President Bush grasp the limits of his freedom agenda without total victory and long-term occupation.

In the aftermath of 10/7, will we make the same mistake? “Our enemies are not barbarians. They are highly-intelligent defenders of a rival civilization,” Nicholson writes.

There are pragmatic reasons to pretend that hatred of Israel and the US isn’t ubiquitous in the Islamic world and to portray our enemies as deranged philistines raving at the gates of progress. The implications of the alternative are certainly depressing. But in a moment of global upheaval, it is much better to build our foreign policy strategy on a sober assessment of the truth….

Most societies are organized around some spiritual tradition which constitutes the moral core of a transnational civilization…. To pretend as if hundreds of millions of Muslims who see the Hamas massacre as morally justified—and who condemn the US preoccupation with Israel’s security—are depraved savages is to insult both them and ourselves.

Finally, deepening our engagement with the history of the West more broadly, two new projects are worthy of mention. The first is a new podcast from Tikvah, The Pillars, a weekly, two-year-long exploration of “Jerusalem, Athens, and the Western Mind” covering “the profound impact of Abraham and Moses, the enduring legacy of Hesiod and Homer, the philosophical inquiries of Plato and Aristotle, the virtues of Cicero and the vices of the Roman Empire, the intellects of Maimonides and Aquinas, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, the literature of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the music of Bach and Mozart, and the poetry of Blake and Byron.” At every turn, Rabbi Rocklin examines “how the Jewish understanding of man as covenantal, sacrificial, and redeemable”—concepts central to Christianity, too—“was integral to the development of Western civilization.”

Second, the Daily Wire serves up Foundations of the West, a 5-part documentary series with Dr. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Spencer Klavan, Jonathan Pageau, and Bishop Robert Barron exploring the ancient cities that shaped the West—Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome—and seeking to “uncover the profound legacies of these civilizations and their lasting impact on the modern world.”

As our public spaces increasingly become a great battlefield of civilizational war, we are being forced to confront anew the question that Lincoln posed nearly 161 years ago: whether our nation “or any nation” conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality “can long endure.”

Hope to see you at coffee.

(1) Into the religious void

Over the summer, I was struck by Russ Roberts’ account of his recent trip to Prague, in which he mourns the decline of Judaism and Christianity in the cultural life of Europe. “It’s a bit ironic for a Jew to sit in a church in Prague and reflect on what has been lost with the demise of Christianity in Europe,” Roberts writes. “You look at the statuary and the frescoes and you see an attempt to inspire human beings to rise above themselves and aspire to greatness. You see a vision of what humanity can be and of a better world…. Christianity was a revolution in how we human beings see ourselves.” But now, he notes, “the soaring music and soaring cathedrals are, like the synagogues of Prague, ancient history, a remnant of what once was.”

Paul Kingsnorth picks up the same theme in an essay last month titled “Into the Void.” The West isn’t “repaganizing,” he argues. It’s worse than that. We no longer believe in anything.

Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief…. If we were really ‘re-paganising’, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing [instead] is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

“Exhibit A” for Kingsnorth is the drag-queen parody of the Last Supper from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The creators of this grotesque display aren’t pagans, he argues, because when criticized, they backtracked and crawfished:

They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the ‘gods’ that they were portraying. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, … blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place….

In the West today, that means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing….

[N]o, this is not an atheist age either. It is not, I would say, any kind of ‘age’ at all. It has no shape. It has no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is, taken in the round, simply a vacuum. There is nothing here at all.

It is a void.

(2) Plankton, “atoms of the ocean”

Moving from the big ideas that form and deform civilization, we zero in on the tiny, unseen building blocks of ocean life: plankton. Ferris Jabr writes in The Guardian that “[p]lankton are so tiny and ubiquitous, they sometimes seem less like creatures within the ocean than atoms of the ocean itself. Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse.”

Plankton are also literal building blocks:

In fact, the vast majority of chalk and limestone formations on Earth, including large sections of the Alps, are the remains of plankton, corals, shellfish and other calcareous sea creatures. Every imposing edifice that humans have constructed with limestone, including the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum and the Empire State Building, is a secret monument to ancient ocean life.

And they play a key role in our planetary thermostat:

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continuously dissolves into the ocean’s surface, where sun-loving phytoplankton incorporate it into their cells during photosynthesis…. When they die, they bump into each other, form little clumps and begin to sink, along with the fecal pellets of zooplankton, carrying carbon to deep, cold, dense water, where it may remain for thousands of years…, accumulating in layers of muck that eventually petrify and trap carbon for millions of years.

In parallel, carbon dioxide spewed by volcanoes combines with water vapour in the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid that falls to land in rain. Due to its slight natural acidity, rainwater reacts with and dissolves the planet’s crust. The chemical reactions involved in this weathering produce various minerals, salts and other molecules, which flow to the ocean via rivers, nourishing marine life. Certain types of cyanobacteria, plankton, corals and molluscs use calcium and bicarbonate ions produced by weathering to construct shells, sheaths, skeletons, reefs and stacked microbial mats called stromatolites. When such creatures die, their carbon-rich remains gradually accumulate in layers of compacted limestone sediment on the seafloor. Over great spans of time, tectonic activity subsumes and transforms the sediments, returning the carbon they contain to the planet’s surface in the form of new mountains or erupting volcanoes, thereby completing the cycle.

If Earth enters a torrential hothouse state, intense and frequent rainfall weathers rock more quickly than usual, flooding the ocean with minerals, nourishing life in the sea and removing carbon from the atmosphere faster than volcanoes can replenish it. Over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, this feedback loop cools the Earth.

Conversely, if ice smothers most of the sea and land, the water cycle effectively stalls, the productivity of plankton and other ocean life drops, and carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, eventually warming the planet. This entire process is therefore largely controlled by life and ultimately allows life to exist on Earth….

Another treat of perusing this piece: the magnified images of microscopic plankton, and a sideways journey into Ernst Haeckel’s mesmerizing 1904 book Art Forms in Nature, which you can browse in full here.

Other Things

• Sky2K: Airlines are running out of flight numbers.

• Magazines are dying, and so are book publishers as authors become more independent.

• Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station broadcasting from sea, turned 60 years old this year.

• Christian virtue class starts next Thursday night, September 12. Sign up here.

(1) The anti-Israel ideology behind the campus protests is coming for America.

The canard that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state is easy enough to refute if one knows even a little history. But the broader theory of settler colonialism is less easily dislodged. At the Wall Street Journal, Adam Kirsch explains that “in recent years, theorists and writers inspired by the idea of settler colonialism have created what amounts to a new countermyth of American history,” one that aims “to change the way Americans understand the history of their country”:

For a long time, Americans were taught that the creation of the United States was a great and providential event. More was at stake in American history than America itself; … it was a test of the human capacity for self-government….

Of course, … the land of freedom was built in part by enslaved people from Africa, on territory conquered from Native Americans. But these parts of the American story were tacitly agreed, by the official tellers of that story, to be inessential. That was the price of sustaining the belief that the history of America was synonymous with the history of liberty.

For the ideology of settler colonialism, too, the United States is the hinge on which world history turned. The difference is that, for this new school, it was a turn toward damnation, not redemption…. Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler, rather than a legitimate inhabitant.

Lurking behind this ideology is Rosseau’s concept of the “noble savage” and an ahistoric fundamentalism. After all, people do not sprout from the land like so many plants. They always come from somewhere—by design, by accident, because they were driven out or drawn in. They mix their labor with the land so that it yields its increase. They build societies that are, by degrees, just or unjust. They protect and defend their land; sometimes they abandon it for another place. They conquer and are conquered.

These are the real and complex facts of human history that explain and justify patterns of migration, settlement, civilization, and flourishing. Settler colonialism flattens all of it into the same sort of binary—oppressed/oppressor, inhabitant/settler—that characterizes so much of faddish academic theory. Kirsch highlights the broader political currents, too:

It is no accident that the ideology of settler colonialism is flourishing today at the same time as right-wing populism. Both see our turbulent political moment as an opportunity to permanently change the way Americans think about their country. And as is often the case, the extremes of right and left are united in disparaging the compromises of liberalism, which they see as weakly evasive. In the case of settler colonialism, this means rejecting the understanding of American history that has been mainstream since the mid-20th century—that it is a story of slow progress toward fulfilling the nation’s founding promise of freedom for all.

(2) Fertility is contagious.

Speaking of population growth and decline, it turns out that infertility is socially contagious. At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney criticizes the notion, common among economists, that low birthrates will self-correct. “[A]ll recent history around the world points in the opposite direction. The past few decades have shown us that low birth rates cause even lower birth rates.” It’s not hard to understand why: “A culture with fewer children … is a culture less welcoming to children.”

But fertility rates can also spiral upward:

[There are] subcultures that are resisting the trend — where more babies lead to more babies. In these places, pregnancy seems to be contagious.

Israel or Utah are two such places where larger families seem endemic. Obviously, the values of Judaism and the Church of Latter Day Saints nudge women and men to be more open to parenthood and large families, but even non-Jews and non-Mormons in these places are abnormally fecund.

Secular Jews in Israel have lower birthrates than the more religious Israelis, but with a birthrate of 1.96 in 2020, they still have far higher birthrates than the average European woman…. [L]ikewise, … Catholics in Utah have a higher birthrate than the Catholics in any other state.

Kemp Mill is a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., anchored by two modern Orthodox synagogues. Kemp Mill looks very different from other neighborhoods in Montgomery County, not only because the residents eschew driving on Saturday but also because families of six, seven, or more are a common sight.

… If you pass through Kemp Mill on a weekend or a summer afternoon, you will see little gangs of children roaming the neighborhood and this hints at the feedback effects. The more children roaming the streets, the easier it is for any individual parent to let his or her children roam the streets, which makes parenting easier and makes having a little platoon of your own more imaginable.

Also, the more neighbors and friends you have who have a toddler and a newborn, the easier it is to have a semblance of a social life while you have a toddler and a newborn. Coffees planned around naptime replace lengthy boozy brunches, and playground picnics replace dinners at fancy restaurants.

Other Things

• Virtues in the Christian Life: Adam Pelser’s Thursday night course runs September 12 - October 24, 6:30-8:00 pm at The NLD Commons (332 N. Tejon St.). Sign up here.

• Religious Freedom Institute launches Campus Faith Alliance to enable religious students to live out their faith and “model peaceful pluralism” on campus.

• Intelligent plants?

• After Most Reluctant Convert, a second Lewis movie aims to portray the middle period of his life, including his rise to fame and “strange” domestic setup.

Hope to see you Friday.

Let’s meet this Friday, August 23, at 6:30 am at Loyal North (Voyager/Ridgeline). It will be good to see many of you, catch up on your summers, and learn what fall has in store. We have some incredible newcomers who will be welcome additions to our number.

Remember our guiding principle of 0-1-2: zero commitment, one hour (or so), and Two Things. Let’s get to it.

(1) Lewis’s Life at Oxford

Given our love of Lewis, it seems only appropriate to inaugurate this season’s Two Things with a new book on his life as an Oxford don. At The Critic, Armand D’Angour reviews C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin. Are there yet more stones of his personal and professional life to overturn and examine? It seems there are:

[Lewis] initially rejected the offer of the Cambridge professorship owing to a reluctance to leave his home in Oxford, … saying that he was precluded from moving by his “peculiar domestic setup”…. The domestic setup was indeed peculiar since, in addition to [his brother Warnie’s heavy drinking], the house was home to Mrs Jane Moore and her daughter Maureen, whose welfare Lewis had undertaken to oversee after Jane’s son, Paddy Moore, had been killed in action in 1918…. The nature of his relationship with Mrs Moore has been a subject of speculation….

Lewis was by his own admission less successful as an administrator than as a scholar. His year as vice-president of Magdalen in 1941 involved sitting on “all college committees”…. Lewis did not enjoy dealing with such minutiae…. He was required to write an official account of his term, and did so as a five-act drama in blank verse entitled “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald”. It survives in the college archives, as does a large corpus of his letters and book drafts written in his neatly slanted handwriting (the illustrations in this book are a pleasure to peruse).

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.”

(2) The Death of the Magazine

This account by Ted Gioia on why magazines, as a business, “almost always get smaller, not bigger” is an insightful look at the depressing economic trends and why even beloved periodicals are in a downward death spiral.

In the year 2024, the traditional magazine is rarely the best platform for serious journalism—and that’s true for both print and digital media. The legacy outlets are all chasing short form ‘content’ (ugh!) now, and have lost confidence in good writing.

But here’s the strange thing. Readers are hungry for the longer, smarter writing that these periodicals refuse to publish. As a result, readers increasingly bypass the magazine and deal directly with writers [such as via Substack and other platforms].

That’s the new reality in media. Readers are now more loyal to writers than they are to periodicals. They seek them out. They trust them more. The magazine as an aggregating concept is increasingly irrelevant….

So if you see a newsstand filled with magazines, go and enjoy it now. Because in the future, you will only see something like that in a museum of defunct media.

I’ll mourn their passing. But those who work in journalism can’t waste too many tears on these dinosaurs—these disappearing magazines of the past. That’s because we all need to get to work building something solid to take their place.

Other Things

• Thursday nights: Adam Pelser’s Thursday night course returns this fall, likely starting the second week of September. The book we’re studying is TBD, probably something on virtue ethics. Stay tuned.

• Biblical archaeology roundup: Giant Second Temple period quarry uncovered | Long lost church altar rediscovered, casually leaning against a wall | 3,300-year-old ship, the oldest ever found in deep seas, discovered off Israeli coast

• Re-enchantment: Apparently, record numbers of pilgrims are journeying to see holy sites around the world. Our little project here to document and visit Colorado’s holy places made some modest gains this summer. We hiked Notch Mountain to see Holy Cross in late June, and I added Christ of the Mines in Silverton, CO to the list.

Hope to see you Friday.

✟ Christian (Catholic) | Silverton, CO

Situated at the base of Anvil Mountain, at an elevation of over 9,300 feet, this impressive 16-foot statue of Jesus overlooks the historic mining town of Silverton, Colorado.

The statue was conceived in 1958 by the Catholic Men’s Club of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church under the leadership of Fr. Joseph Halloran. After selecting the site, they collected donations from Silverton’s citizens. Local stonemasons built the base and grotto with local stone. The statue itself consists of 12 tons of Italian Carrara marble, the same source as Michelangelo’s David. The figure of Jesus is depicted with outstretched arms, the Most Sacred Heart upon his breast and the crown of thorns at his feet.

The full structure was completed in 1959 and dedicated. The top plaque affixed to the base reads:

This shrine erected in honor of CHRIST OF THE MINES by the people of Silverton to ask God’s blessing on the mining industry of the San Juans 1958-1959

In 1978, a seeming miracle occurred. On June 4 that year, high in the mountains above Silverton, Lake Emma breached and flooded the caverns of the Sunnyside Mine. The water pressure was so intense that it shot mining equipment out of the portals and into the air. But June 4 was a Sunday—the miners were not at work. Not a single life was lost. In 1982, a new plaque was added to the base of the statue to commemorate the miracle:

In thanksgiving to Christ of the Mines for deliverance of entire work force when Lake Emma flooded Sunnyside Mine June 4 (Sunday, mine closed) 1978

St. Patrick Centennial
August 15, 1982

The shrine can be found on 15th Street / Scenic Drive in Silverton, a short drive along a smooth dirt road east of State Hwy 550 (the “Million Dollar Highway”) and then a brief hike up a steep hill.

A metal offering box, with three crosses on its hinged top, is located nearby, where pilgrims and visitors leave offerings, prayers, and devotional objects. Note also the shamrock, a symbol of St. Patrick.

Sources: Lynn Arave, Deseret News | Atlas Obscura | Catholic Travel Guide | Linda Wommack, Colorado’s Historic Churches (2019), pp.125-26 (incorrectly calling it “Christ of the Mountains Shrine” and differing with other sources on the height (“twelve feet”) and weight (“five tons”)).

Visit date: July 24, 2024.

» Part of the “Holy Places” series at Blessings of Liberty «

Don’t forget: our guided tour of Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church is tomorrow, May 16, at 1:00 pm. We have a group of about ten thus far. Let me know if you’re planning to make it. Would love to see you there.

(1) University Reformation

We follow a few trends in this newsletter. One is the steep decline—call it a hollowing out, a nosedive, a moral bankrupting—of the American university, or at least of the “mainstream” American university. Solveig Lucia Gold at First Things points the finger at the DEI regime, which “splinters communities” by design, drains esprit de corps, and kills any sense of a larger institutional identity:

The keffiyeh-clad students who run around campuses shouting “Intifada!” while celebrating the cancellation of in-person classes are activists first and students a very distant second. Those who have occupied Beinecke Plaza, right outside Yale’s Civil War Memorial, do not see pro-Israel students as their fellow Yalies—they scarcely see them as their fellow humans….

As the protests continue and university presidents cling to their jobs, they keep trying to appeal to common values and community—to (in the words of Columbia’s Minouche Shafik) “rebuild the ties that bind us together.” But after decades of deliberate balkanization, the rhetoric rings hollow. To the left-wing majority in academia, institutional loyalty is meaningless, if not deplorable. And the conservatives who do value the role of institutional loyalty in civic life have nevertheless deservedly lost trust in these particular institutions.

And so, unfortunately, our universities are getting the commencement season they deserve. Columbia’s being forced to cancel its university-wide graduation ceremony is the logical outcome of DEI’s ongoing attack on institutional spirit, tradition, and camaraderie. Instead of caps and gowns, keffiyehs. Instead of silly inflatable lions, inflatable tents. Instead of “Stand, Columbia,” “From the river to the sea.”

Over the weekend, Tikvah’s CEO Eric Cohen called for an “Exodus Project”—a renewal of the American covenant, a return to the nation’s biblical roots, with Jews and Christians rebuilding together, starting with the university:

American Jews will need a paradigm shift in our political, moral, and civilizational imagination. We will need to build deeper friendships and alliances with patriotic Americans—especially Christian Americans—who love Israel, share our Hebraic values, and seek our guidance in renewing the moral center of American culture. We will need to relocate in large numbers to new and more welcoming parts of the country—including the Southeast, the Southwest, and other more conservative regions of the country that protect religious freedom and promote religious education.

And bigger changes are already afoot—there are reasons to hope. The University of Austin will welcome its first undergraduate class this fall. Hildegard College is wrapping up its first academic year. Other Christian and classically-oriented institutions are popping up, like Trinity College of Louisville and New Aberdeen College. And Hillsdale College, Southern Methodist University, University of Florida, Colorado Christian University continue to exhibit strength, civic vitality, institutional promise.

The genius of what Irving Kristol once called the “Protestant impulse” of America is its ability to self-correct. When the mainstream becomes polluted, reformers dig new canals, reroute flows, refresh the waters of civic and institutional life. Perhaps what we’re seeing in education is a new reformation—itself perhaps the headwaters of a larger cultural revival. One dares hope.

(2) “I think you are a Christian.”

Recent Christian convert Ayaan Hirsi Ali and self-proclaimed “cultural Christian” Richard Dawkins sat down for a debate earlier this month at the inaugural Dissident Dialogues conference in New York. UnHerd reports on the conversation. Dawkins admits he “came here prepared to persuade you, Ayaan, that you’re not a Christian.” Yet he is the one who left persuaded: “I think you are a Christian,” he told her. Dawkins still thinks “Christianity is nonsense,” though he considers himself on “Team Christianity.”

For her part, Ali offered “a more personal glimpse into her conversion experience. Her belief in Christ, she said, is separate from the belief she shares with Dawkins — that Christianity is a useful, pro-civilisational force.” Yet “good for civilization” is neither a criterion of truth nor a durable ethical principle:

“What you value in Christianity is something that really is absolutely necessary to pass on to the next generation,” [Ali] told Dawkins. “And we have failed the next generation by taking away from them that moral framework and telling them it’s nonsense and false. We have also not protected them from the external forces that come for their hearts, minds and souls.”

Other Things — Summer Haps

• June 18: Lewis & War Lecture: My friend Marc LiVecche, scholar of war, ethics, and public life, will be in Colorado Springs June 18. I’m hosting him for a lecture and dinner on C.S. Lewis and war. Please mark your calendar. I’ll send details soon.

• June 22: Holy Cross Hike: On Saturday, June 22, please join me for a hike along Fall Creek to the top of Notch Mountain to glimpse Colorado’s famous Mount of the Holy Cross. We’ll trek out and back about 10 miles, gain and then lose about 2,800 feet, and marvel at the cruciform geology. The hike will be strenuous, and the cross of snow is not as distinct today as when Thomas Moran rendered it in watercolor over a century ago. But the payoff will be divine! Mark you calendar. I’ll share details with those who express interest.

Subscribers to this newsletter received via email last week a special invitation to a guided tour of Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church in downtown Colorado Springs, part of our Holy Places series. The tour begins at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 16. Please let me know if you can make it.

Now, on to Two Things….

(1) Legacy of the Essenes: Two weeks ago, I began a deep dive into the Essenes, the ascetic Jewish community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. It all started with a Tablet article about 20th-century literary critic Edmund Wilson, who, besides hating Tolkien, helped to popularize the significance of the Scrolls in a lengthy 1955 New Yorker essay, “The Scrolls of the Dead Sea.” It was that essay’s discussion of the Essenes, and their resemblance to early Christianity, that arrested my attention:

[T]he thing that we are immediately struck by is the resemblance of the Essenes to the Christians. You have the doctrine of human brotherhood; you have the practice of ritual washing, of which baptism is a prominent feature; you have communism, which the early Christians practiced among themselves. You have phrases that bring Christian echoes…. It seems obvious that the monastic tradition of the Christians must ultimately have derived from the Essenes….

Taken together, Wilson writes, these similarities “constitute a very impressive whole.”

Now, here I need to cop to some ignorance: even though the Scrolls were rediscovered almost 80 years ago and scholars since then have steadily excavated their insights—particularly what they reveal about both first-century (and earlier) Judaism and the origins of Christianity—almost none of this ever hit my intellectual radar.

So, to remedy the situation, I picked up and quickly devoured a book titled Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls by John Bergsma, a theology professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Bergsma marches steadily through early (and extant) Christian practices—baptism, the Eucharist, marriage, celibacy, priesthood, and even the concept of “the Church”—and draws striking parallels to the Scrolls and the practices of the Essene community, particularly at Qumran, which is near the caves where the Scrolls were discovered.

Bergsma suggests, for example, that Essene theology and practice shed light on the teachings and lifestyle of John the Baptist, who Bergsma thinks was raised in an Essene community. The Scrolls also help explain unique features of the gospel and epistles of John the Apostle, including characteristic Johannine expressions like “Spirit of truth” and “children of light.”

One of the more interesting chapters in the book is “When Was the Last Supper?”, in which Bergsma points out that the Essenes followed a different liturgical calendar than mainstream (Pharisaical) Judaism, resulting in different dates for Passover in the first century—not unlike the differences between Eastern and Western Christians in the dating of Easter. The calendrical difference, Bergsma suggests, explains discrepancies between the Synoptics and John’s gospel in dating the events of Passion Week. (Bergsma also thinks the “Upper Room,” the site of the Last Supper, was an Essene “community house” in Jerusalem, and he points to a number of “provocative parallels” between the Last Supper and the ritualistic meals of the Essene community at Qumran.)

(2) It wasn’t Adam’s rib: A Christian and a Jew walk into a podcast … and talk biblical anthropology. This month, Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm hosted Christian actor Nathaniel Buzolic (“Nate Buzz”) on the latest episode of Good Faith Effort for an attentive exploration of the Book of Genesis. Their discussion of the account of Eve’s creation in Genesis 2 yields up interpretive insights I hadn’t encountered before. My partial transcript, starting about 42:30, follows (all essentially R. Lamm at this point):

[When a suitable mate isn’t found for Adam,] what’s the next thing that happens? ... What everyone says [is that] God puts Adam to sleep, takes his rib out of his body, and makes Eve. That’s what the Bible says? No, it’s not what the Bible says! It’s one of the most famous mistranslations in the history of biblical storytelling.

[Genesis 2:21 says] the LORD God caused a great sleep to fall upon Adam ... and God took a tzelah from Adam and made it into Eve. Now, that word tzelah, the King James Bible famously translates as rib.... That little bone becomes Eve, so Eve is somehow lesser than Adam.

… [Yet] never in the entire Bible does [tzelah] mean rib…. During the time of the Bible, it’s a very specific term. It’s not even anatomical.... It’s an architectural term, and what it means is side. The next time we meet that word is [Exodus 25:12, where God commands the Israelites to fashion the Ark of the Covenant “with two rings on one side and two rings on the other”]. The Ark of the Covenant has two sides…. That’s what tzelah means—a half, a side.

So what happens [in Genesis] is God … puts that first human being to sleep, splits that human being in half. “Half of you is gonna be Adam, the other half is gonna be Eve.”

How do we know that’s the case? ... [The literal sense of the next verse, verse 23, is that] God built a rib. What does it mean, God built a rib? ... The answer [is that] it’s not rib.... God built the other half, that half of Adam, into Eve.

[Verse 24 then says] “Therefore, a man will leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife and they will be one flesh.” What does that “therefore” mean? Just because God made Eve from Adam’s rib, therefore people get married? No! ... It’s because [God] splits that first human being, and splits them apart into halves.... So men and women ... spend their entire lives looking to reunite those halves, to recreate that first moment of creation when humanity was whole.

Other Things

• “The UK has been quietly emerging and advancing as a global leader on the issue of international religious freedom.”

• “This is the freshman class of 2020 reaching its graduating year. That year, they came for the statues. Today, they are coming for the Jews, and tomorrow it may be the rest of us.”

• TV has a backstory problem. Backstories themselves have a trauma problem.

✟ Christian (Protestant evangelical) | Colorado Springs, CO

Nestled in a narrow valley (or “park”) among the red rock formations north of Garden of the Gods, Glen Eyrie Castle is an impressive stone manor built in the Tudor Revival style. Completed in 1904, it served as the home of General William Jackson Palmer, a Brigadier General in the Union Army during the Civil War, president of The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, and founder of Colorado Springs.

The castle’s predecessor was a much smaller, though still luxurious, clapboard home, where General Palmer and his wife, Mary “Queen” Mellen Palmer, lived with their three daughters. Shortly after Queen Palmer’s death in 1894 (age 44), General Palmer commissioned the design and construction of the castle. As Susan Fletcher and Amy Burch write in The Glen Eyrie Story, “The stunning transformation of Glen Eyrie turned the estate into one of the most spectacular homes in the West” (p.40).

The exterior consists of stone quarried from a local canyon; the windows and doors are carved out of Indiana limestone. Upon entry, General Palmer’s guests were welcomed into a large hall with heads of big game and impressive paintings upon the walls. The first floor featured a drawing room, dining room, library, and General Palmer’s personal den. The basement boasted a bowling alley, billiard room, and steam room with white tile and marble. The castle included “cutting-edge technology of the day, including a central vacuum, elevator, weather register, and a fire hose that ran the three stories of the house” (p.41). It was one of the first homes in Colorado to have electricity, generated by a small coal-fired power plant in the valley, built by General Palmer specifically for that purpose. Tourists flocked to the site to glimpse the beautiful exterior and grounds.

After General Palmer passed away in 1909, the castle changed ownership several times. In 1938, it was purchased by George and Susan Strake of Houston, Texas, owners of Strake Petroleum. The Strakes were devout Catholics and deeply invested in religious causes. In 1946, they hosted the papal secretary Msgr. Giovanni Montini—the future Pope Paul VI—at Glen Eyrie.

After a catastrophic flood in the valley, the Strakes listed the estate for sale at $500,000. The Navigators, an evangelism and discipleship ministry founded in California, and the Reverend Billy Graham expressed interest in purchasing the property together, and the Strakes, to facilitate ministry ownership, reduced the asking price to $300,000. In the end, Graham decided that owning the property would distract from his evangelistic work, and The Navigators purchased it in 1953.

Today, Glen Eyrie serves as the headquarters of The Navigators and the locus of its conference and retreat ministry, where it hosts overnight guests, group retreats, weddings, conferences, summer camps, as well as teas and historical tours. The Great Hall, originally known as the Book Hall, welcomes guests at Christmastime for the annual Madrigal Banquet, a 16th-century-style evening of food and spectacular music, dancing, and entertainment from a talented troupe of performers.

Sources: Susan Fletcher & Amy Burch, The Glen Eyrie Story (2021) | Glen Eyrie (The Navigators) | Colorado Encyclopedia

» Part of the “Holy Places” series at Blessings of Liberty «

(1) The Distributed City of the Future: Walter Russell Mead’s essay this month at Tablet is “The Rise of the Cyber City,” and it’s a tour de force. Mead traces the rise of the great American railroad cities—centralized urban cores built around factories and tenements—and their subsequent decline as the automobile widened the pattern of development, creating the suburb. Now, Mead says, we’re on the cusp of another major transition—from the car city to the cyber city:

The rise of the cyber city is going to be at least as disruptive as the move from rail to car cities, and many of our social and political institutions may not survive the shift. Nevertheless, for social, economic, and environmental reasons it is something to welcome.

The suburban (and increasingly exurban) car city creates what Mead calls the daily Great Migration: “Morning and evening, five to six days a week, hundreds of millions of commuters have long swarmed into and out of the world’s central business districts.” Maintaining the infrastructure to accommodate these commuters—office buildings, restaurants, public transportation networks, parking facilities—“employ[s] tens of millions of people around the world and consume[s] a significant portion of the world’s daily energy and financial expense.”

The cyber city, driven by the work from home (WFH) phenomenon, will disrupt all of this, threatening “a massive dislocation in the life of the American city, a shift that is likely to be much more far reaching than the shift between the rail and car cities that the 20th century witnessed.” Mead thinks we should embrace it:

The distributed city of the future, in which communications technology, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, delivery by drone, and other technologies that allow the near-universal expansion of work, will largely transcend geography…. The city and the countryside will be integrated, with human beings able to live anywhere from dense urban cores to remote rural retreats while fully participating in the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of urban life.

We are not there yet, and WFH alone won’t get us there, but embracing WFH where practical is an important step with significant benefits.

Among these benefits: slashing the cost of the commuting infrastructure, less auto emissions, reducing unproductive commute time, less vulnerability to centralized catastrophes (earthquake, flood, terrorism), and most importantly, “a return to stronger communities and a recentering of human life on neighborhoods and families.” Mead elaborates on the latter:

The era of the car city was an era of bedroom communities that emptied out during the working day, and an era of rapid mobility as workers followed their careers from city to city. Loosening the power of geography over our working lives will give us more freedom to live where we choose, enabling people to put down roots without giving up the opportunities that, in past decades, came only with mobility. The distributed city will allow human civilization to synthesize the blessings of rural and urban life, and allow the reintegration of school, work, and community life in ways that strengthen the bonds connecting relatives and neighbors.

(2) Digital Defrocking: Catholic Answers, a San Diego-based ministry, claims to have “the world’s largest database of answers about the beliefs and practices of the Catholic faith.” So it created “Father Justin,” an AI chatbot-priest designed to synthesize this information and answer user questions about the Catholic faith. But as The Pillar reports, “the experiment quickly became controversial”:

Some said the priest avatar was inappropriate, misleading, or just plain creepy. Some said the priest simulated virtual sacraments — indeed, “Fr. Justin” gladly heard The Pillar’s, “confession,” before giving some spiritual guidance and reciting the words of absolution. And some said that an AI apologetics project leans too heavily into unreliable, controversial, and still-confusing technology.

The author of The Pillar report experimented with the chatbot himself:

First, I asked ‘Father Justin’ to hear my confession, and it did so, simulating a ‘virtual confession,’ all the way to giving me absolution and a penance.

Second, I asked if I could baptize my baby with Gatorade in an emergency, and ‘Father Justin’ said yes — and of course, that’s not true. I can’t baptize my baby with Gatorade.

Catholic Answers doesn’t think a chatbot-priest is too impersonal:

[W]e get tons of questions from people. We get more than 2 million visits a month at catholic.com, and a video from a Catholic Answers apologist like Trent Horn might get 50,000 views soon after it comes out — so the vast majority of our contact with people is not really interpersonal.

I would prefer that all of our work was directly personal, but we don’t have enough people. And we don’t have the money to hire enough people to answer the number of questions that come in.

So we are just looking for creative ways to help people learn more about their faith. 

Since The Pillar interview, however, Catholic Answers has essentially laicized its cyber-cleric. “Father Justin” is now just “Justin.” The chatbot is still available at Catholic.com, but Catholic Answers promises to “continue to refine and improve the app” based on user input.

Other Things | Community Haps

• Our next Holy Places tour will be Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church on Thursday, May 16, at 1:00 pm. An email with more details is forthcoming.

• Paul Kingsnorth will present the 2024 Erasmus Lecture for First Things.

• AI deciphers ancient scroll to reveal Plato’s burial place.

• “Dignitas Infinita Betrays Catholic Just War Doctrine,” promoting “pacifist idealism.”

• Students at Columbia are now morphing into proto-terrorists in the mold of those they openly praise. Meanwhile, something different is happening at Christian universities. At Liberty U, “there were no arrests, no anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish sentiments. Instead, the massive crowd joined together to pray, worship, and read the Bible.”

(1) Worse than pagans? (Better?): At First Things, N.S. Lyons reviews and critiques John Daniel Davidson’s new book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, suggesting that ours is not an age of repaganization but of the full flowering of modern, post-Christian materialism. Lyons’ essay is a grab-bag of debatable insights:

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is the slogan [Davidson] repeats many times throughout the book to encapsulate the core proposition of paganism, ancient and modern. This, it strikes me, is wrong. The pagan of the ancient world may have held a moral worldview alien to ours, but he was no nihilist….

It is not, then, the slogan of paganism, but something else entirely: the worldview of materialist modernity, produced by the centuries of metaphysical drift that first pushed God out of the world and then pushed the Western mind deeper and deeper into cold rationalism….

C. S. Lewis, for one, was always skeptical of such claims…. In fact, he pointed out, “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”…

What is happening? Citing a recent wave of religious conversions by formerly atheistic public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson has argued that we are experiencing the beginning of a “Counter-Enlightenment.”… I think he is right: The whole edifice of modernity is in crisis. But this should be a cause for Christian hope, not panic. In fact, it seems possible that our time may witness a transition not into Davidson’s new “pagan dark age,” but out of what Lewis called the true dark age of modern materialism.

(2) Analog nostalgia: “Things used to work in this country,” proclaims Pennsylvania writer Clare Coffey in her essay at The New Atlantis. She writes eloquently of the beauty of old analog machines over against our new technocratic devices:

The GE radio is not a family heirloom for its design features, however. It is an heirloom because it has accompanied us through three generations of baseball games and school closure announcements and Saturday morning public radio folk hours. And it has accompanied us not because it had any particular emotional significance to begin with, but because it just works, and has worked, and continues to work. You can take it anywhere, plug it in anywhere….

[W]hen I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.

Other Things

• Passover is biblical … and American: “a source of faith for those seeking freedom for the benefit of all.”

• Biblical archaeology: Scarlet, purple, and sapphire hues used in the Temple in Jerusalem “likely came from sea snails processed at a 3,000-year-old dye factory in modern-day Haifa.”

• Colorado’s 14ers get a height adjustment from new NOAA data: “Pikes Peak is two feet shorter at 14,107 feet.”

✟ Christian (Episcopal) | Colorado Springs, CO

Grace Episcopal Church was formally organized in 1873, erecting a church building at the corner of Pikes Peak Avenue and Weber Street on land donated by the founder of the City of Colorado Springs, General William Jackson Palmer. Twenty years later, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church was organized, with its building at the corner of Tejon Street and Monument Avenue.

In 1923, the two parishes merged to become Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. It remains today a place of worship, service, and community in the heart of downtown Colorado Springs.

The cornerstone for the combined church’s new building on Tejon Street was laid in 1925. The Gothic Revival-style structure was designed by the Boston firm Frohman, Robb and Little, which also designed the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. and Trinity College Chapel in Hartford, Connecticut. The church is laid out in a traditional cruciform plan. Its three-story bell tower was modeled after the Great Tower at Magdalen College, Oxford University. In 1955, a new, south wing was added, designed in a Tudor Revival style.

The church’s interior features 48 stained glass windows designed by nine different artists between 1899 and 2005.

The church’s Welte Co. organ boasts more than 4,000 pipes. Funds for the organ were donated in 1928 by Alice Bemis Taylor in honor of her late husband, Frederick Taylor, with the condition that the organ be used to benefit of all citizens of Colorado Springs, including a number of free concerts each year. This tradition continues today with the church’s Taylor Concerts series. Thanks to Ms. Taylor’s gift, Grace and St. Stephens became a center of musical life in Colorado Springs, fostering the establishment of the Colorado Springs Symphony, the Colorado Opera Festival, the Colorado Springs Choral Society, the Colorado Vocal Arts Ensemble, and the church’s own Jazz in the Garden.

Sources: Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church | “Get to Know Our Sacred Space” | NHRP Reg. Form (2011)

Tour date: May 16, 2024

» Part of the “Holy Places” series at Blessings of Liberty «