Project 2025 is a policy text produced by the Heritage Foundation that offers a systematic overhaul of the Executive Office of the President and all related agencies, departments, and functions. The text’s opening remarks describe the need to not only “rescue the country from the grip of the radical left,” but also to put the right people in place who can craft and carry out this agenda “on day one of the next conservative administration” (About Project 2025 | Project 2025). There is the temptation to suggest that the policy rhetoric of Project 2025 is not worth discussing, on the grounds that ..read more

Much of the news (rightly so) is focused on Project 2025 and Agenda 47, a series of policy proposals that weaken democratic norms and are, to be frank, nothing more than the consolidation of power within the executive branch of the federal government. With the ongoing dismantling of the important work of federal administrative agencies, the unequal application of human rights from state to state, and the ever-growing threat of Christian Nationalism (expressed in the distressing theocratic tendencies in states like Oklahoma and Louisiana), it is understandable that one might have a reasonable a ..read more

In recent years, much genealogical work has been done to understand the Protestant dimensions of the Enlightenment, especially as it relates to the development of liberal democracy over time. In one sense, the work of revealing what lies at our roots helps us to better understand where we came from – it also helps us to understand where we are now and may even give us insight to consider where we might have to go. In a philosophical sense, the Kantian turn moved God outside the bounds of what we can know, reframing metaphysics as essentially an epistemological project. Freedom and immortality ..read more

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This has often been misunderstood to mean that the universe itself has some moral orientation, or that all things work themselves out in the end. But this is not true. In the context of his sermon, he invited his listeners to understand an important truth: that not only are we co-creators with the Divine, but we are also deeply and intimately connected to one another. Or, as Desmond Tutu taught: my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours. For many Christians, today ..read more

For the past few months, a group of us throughout Rhode Island have been paying close attention to efforts to undermine the separation of church and state. On the national level, we have seen the erosion of this separation play out in legislative attempts to ban books, in efforts to undermine the liberties and protections of minority groups, and in the formation of the so-called “parental rights” movement. As Rhode Islanders, the thinning of the barrier between civil and religious society is particularly strange to watch, given the historical reality of the essential claims made by our state’s ..read more

We are told, “the church is dying.” Perhaps. Several years ago, I helped develop a two-year internship program that gave those discerning a call to ministry an opportunity to do the work, a notion rooted in the idea that having some sense of what professional ministerial life looks before you head to seminary is helpful. Since our program was grant funded, I was required to attend a two-day conference designed to help us learn important tools to evaluate growth and success. On our first day, we were presented with an organizational model that argues that the exact moment an institution or prog ..read more

My early years of Christian formation were dominated by a triumphant Jesus, a messiah who saved only those believers who had it right – everyone else was destined for eternal torment and punishment. In an ironic twist, it was my four years of philosophical and biblical training at a private Christian college where my thinking on what it meant to be a follower of Jesus radically shifted. If I could sum the existential crisis up, it would be the basic recognition that God is not a Christian. God isn’t Jewish, or Muslim either. And yet, I am struck by how often we retreat into the binary, into th ..read more

Since my role at the council is technically part time, the other part of my life involves leading (torturing?) undergraduate students in the ways of logic and critical thinking. As we work through different logical fallacies, I typically include examples from the world of religion and politics to illustrate the potential critical thinking pitfalls involved. When I ask them if they were raised in environments where they were discouraged from talking about religion and politics they almost always answer in the affirmative. The reality of that fact points to not only how important it is to talk a ..read more

Leading researchers who study the effects of gratitude, i.e., giving thanks, have noted that people who spend time writing down the things that they are grateful for, managers who thank their staff for the work that they do, and folks in committed relationships who take the time to share their gratitude with one another, experience greater happiness, deeper inter-personal connections, and have fewer visits to their physicians. Some studies have shown that the positive effects of giving thanks are most intensely (and positively) felt by those with a more developed sense of emotional maturity, i ..read more

On my drive home the other day I was listening to an interview with Dr. Jeremy Nobel, a primary care physician who has led efforts to develop applications for utilizing creative arts expressions as a remedy to national health issues, in particular, loneliness. This, of course, got me thinking about St. Augustine. To those who know me, not that surprising…but for everyone else, hear me out. One of Augustine’s early theological entanglements was a robust discourse with a sect of Christians who called themselves Donatists, a group defined by their unorthodox practice of rebaptizing Christians int ..read more