Medium • 17th April 2025

In Whom Do We Trust?

The offhand comment came during the final moments of a White House press briefing, but it revealed a deep fault line in American civic life.Pressed about the economic fallout from a new round of tariffs that sent markets reeling, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt replied: “Trust in President Trump. He knows what he’s doing. This is a proven economic formula.”No data. No rationale. No explanation of risk or cost. Just a confident assertion of faith in the man at the helm.It’s a curious...

Medium • 14th April 2025

The Garden and the Sword: Should Christians Rethink Power in the Era of Trump?

W e live in a moment thick with threats — some real, some exaggerated, all politicized. Immigration, national security, and foreign policy have become flashpoints for a public discourse increasingly shaped by aggression and militancy. Since 2016, the Trump administration has championed a style of politics defined by force — rhetorical and literal — and many Christians have followed eagerly behind.Evangelicals in particular have shown strong alignment with hardline policies. A recent Lifeway Rese...

Medium • 12th March 2025

Testing the Limits: Do the Bible’s Ends Always Justify Our Means?

(The third article in the Lenten Series on Faith and Politics)In Luke’s account of Christ’s temptation, Satan takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and dares Him to throw Himself down, citing Scripture to suggest that God would surely rescue Him. The enemy’s challenge is clear: prove your identity, force God’s hand, and put Him to the test. Jesus responds with a rebuke, quoting Deuteronomy: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Luke 4:12, Deuteronomy 6:16).Satan’s final taunt i...

Medium • 14th February 2025

How the Mighty Have Fallen: The Republican Party and the Cult of Power

If the right no longer believes in the wisdom of the people, then what exactly is it conserving?William F. Buckley Jr. famously quipped that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Manhattan phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. His reasoning was simple: expertise alone does not confer wisdom, nor does it guarantee good governance. But how far have we fallen that today’s right-wing populists — who once championed the virtue of common sense over technocratic elitis...

Medium • 7th February 2025

With Successes Like These, Who Needs Victories?

Trump and Musk’s attack on USAID is a victory for small government — but at what cost?In 280 BC, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, a highly regarded military commander and hired mercenary, led his forces into Italy at the behest of the Greek city of Tarentum. His campaign was meant to check Rome’s expansion, but it quickly became an exercise in self-destruction. At the Battle of Heraclea, Pyrrhus achieved a narrow victory against the Romans, inflicting heavy losses. However, his own forces — especially hi...

Medium • 31st January 2025

Disordered Amoris: What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Love

J.D. Vance’s recent remarks on ordered love have set off a predictable furor. In a brief clip circulating online, Vance argues that there is a Christian hierarchy of obligations: “You love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.” He then asserts that “a lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” The statement is simple, intuitive, and — to many conservativ...

Medium • 31st January 2025

A Salute to Shame: Musk, Martin, and Germany’s Ghosts

In recent weeks, public debate has been ignited by a series of controversial gestures. The first, during President Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk made a gesture that many interpreted as a Roman or Nazi salute. The second, Episcopal Priest Calvin Martin seemingly emulated Musk’s gesture at the March for Life rally. Concurrently, Germany has witnessed the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a far-right political movement gaining significant traction, with Musk’s suppport. These dispa...

Medium • 29th January 2025

A Church Set Apart: The Barmen Declaration and the Perils of Christian Nationalism

On January 21, 2025, during the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington stood at the pulpit and delivered a sermon that would soon ignite a firestorm. Directly addressing President Donald Trump, she called upon him to govern with mercy, to remember the vulnerable, and to show compassion to the marginalized — immigrants, the poor, LGBTQ+ individuals, and those who feared his administration’s policies. Her words we...

Medium • 20th October 2020

The Good News in a Fake News Culture

So there is a direct correlation between how we as Christians handle the news from the world with how we handle the Good News for the world.

Medium • 19th October 2020

When Inescapable Hate… meets Unavoidable Love

When one turns on the TV, goes online, or logs onto social media, there is little doubt about the presence of hate within our culture. Increasingly, our politics and our discourse are filled with invective and vitriol that used to be reserved for times of war, or maybe Thanksgiving dinners. We have blocked our neighbors and ostracized our families, all because of their politics. Ironically, what we often condemn in others we would be well-advised to avoid in ourselves. As Hermann Hesse, the Nob

Medium • 29th September 2020

Trump Exploits Conservatives, They Should Not Reward Him For It: A Response to Hunter Baker

I believe that we are not passively watching the redefinition of conservatism, rather we are in an active fight over the definition itself. Political parties maybe soulless, but their underlying ideologies can not afford to be.

ERLC • 27th January 2020

Why evangelicals must speak up about anti-Semitism : 3 things to understand about the Jewish people

Recently, there have been a string of violent attacks against the Jewish community in America. 2019 saw an almost unprecedented increase in hostility toward American Jewry; from a vandalized synagogue in Beverly Hills and a desecrated cemetery in Nebraska, to a series of knife attacks and shootings in New York and New Jersey. In New York alone, in one week, there were nine acts of violence against Jewish people. Long known as one of the few places where it is OK to be a Jew, America is becoming

Providence • 15th October 2019

Christian Missions: Divine Calling or Cause for Concern?

The theme of the latest print issue of Providence is the sometimes conflicted and often contentious relationship between Christian missions and US foreign policy. There are few arenas of public engagement where the precepts of Christian theology and the politics of American statecraft come in such proximity to one another. This interaction is unavoidable, and missionaries and international relations practitioners would do well to understand its origins and effects. The Gospel writers Luke and M

Providence • 4th September 2019

The Burden of Leadership

A common myth in antiquity is that of Sisyphus. He makes an appearance in classic works by Homer, Ovid, and Plato and in modern poetry by Albert Camus. Sisyphus was the king of Corinth in ancient Greece and was known as much for his achievements as the avarice which followed. Like many who suffer the blessing of success, he attempted to prolong the same by cheating death. While he prevailed in eluding death, he was cursed with an eternal burden. It was the fate of Sisyphus to lift a great stone

Providence • 6th August 2019

The Fault in Our Stars: Tyson, Trump, and the Search for Human Worth

America’s collective consciousness has been assaulted of late by the rapid-fire reports of mass shootings across the country. What was once an almost unthinkable rarity has become a commonplace crime. This has lead to the posting of travel warnings by foreign governments, looking after the safety of their own citizens traveling to the US. Scarcely a week passes between tragedies, and in the case of this past weekend mere hours. When these events occur we are caught between simultaneous impulses

Providence • 7th May 2019

The Reality of Peace

This article about peace first appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of Providence’s print edition. To read the original in a PDF format, click here. To receive future issues as soon as they’re published, subscribe here. Much of the human experience is consumed in the pursuit of peace. It is a universal human longing. The peace we pursue is not merely the quiet enjoyment of life’s little pleasures, but the restoration of the real life we were created to enjoy. Something in this world is not right.

Providence • 27th March 2019

Trump, Mueller, and the Glorious Hassle of Justice

Against the backdrop of a watching world, the United States is in the midst of an intense period of self-inflicted investigation and crisis. This past week, Robert Mueller released his much awaited, oft-decried, but constitutionally permissible report into the allegations of election tampering and collusion in the 2016 election. According to the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr, Mueller practically exonerated the Trump campaign and its operators of any and all allegations of

Providence • 2nd January 2019

Charity, Common Sense, and the Failure of Falwell's Imagination

Within the arena of politics, very little is surprising these days. In this post-modern era with its ubiquitous news and constant access to information, it is almost impossible for us to outrun contempt and sneak up on surprise. Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century and the best we can do with each new headline is to feign shock and affect awe. A half-century of American cynicism has left our consciousnesses with the collective numbness of an addict hoping to feel something to prove t

Providence • 10th December 2018

Human Rights in the Balance: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 70 Years On

Seventy years ago today, the United Nations General Assembly in Paris adopted Resolution 217 A. Drafted by eight men and one woman, representing nine countries on five continents, the resolution is more commonly referred to as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It was a watershed document produced by a war-weary world and aimed to recognize “the inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace

Providence • 11th September 2018

Reckoning with Reality: Does 9/11 still matter?

Events shape our world. Moreover, our lives conform to the contours of circumstances both planned and unexpected. You are who you are largely because you have lived through what you have lived through. Replace the time and you alter reality, exchange the events, and you will fundamentally change how you live. Like any great sculpture, the image of reality that we are familiar with has been chiseled by force. Before the Pieta, there was the pain, and before the statue there was the pounding of th