Political Philosophy

“Both parties have, at various times, hitched their wagons to populism. … Conservatives deserve special criticism for fomenting populism because conservatism is supposed to be temperamentally skeptical of excessive political passion.” - Goldberg

“There are still arrangements like this. They’re called monasteries. Before exploring how monasteries show us how ‘socialism’ can work, let me acknowledge that I’m hesitant to present monasticism as ‘socialism.’ The voluntary profession of monasticism has nothing to do with the state seizing the means of production or the mass terror that inevitably follows in its wake.” - Acton

“for a small but growing cadre of intellectual Roman Catholics the political philosophy of ‘integralism,’ with church and state integrated, not separate, is increasingly common. There’s disagreement over practical specifics, but what unites integralists is their conviction that the liberal democratic order is now, and perhaps always was, morally bankrupt.” - James Diddams

“Absolute freedom of speech is not a moral right. … there can be no moral right to commit wrong, although there may often be a legal right. And clearly a great deal of speech, expression, and writing is wrong—whether by spreading falsehood, seducing to sin, tearing down the innocent, and much more.” - TGC

“The main lesson [of Rasmussen’s new book Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders] is to not place much hope in the amount of happiness, amity, and social progress that politics alone can produce. And the great teacher of that lesson, the lone Founder who retained a great deal of optimism about the American future, is James Madison.” - The Dispatch

“…ruling the ‘spirit of the trickster’ out of hand runs the theological risk of mistaking longstanding human conventions for points of natural law—just as, in a slightly different context, the priests of Jesus’s day confused whether the Sabbath was made for man or vice versa” - John Ehret

“Have you noticed this vision of Christianity in the public square that seems muscular, confident,… tired of Christianity’s never-ending losses in the culture war. It rightly criticizes the decadence, perversion, and irrational norms of secularism and understands that under the guise of ‘neutrality,’ secularism has become the functional god of this age.” - TGC

“Tertullian, Roger Williams, and John MacArthur debate the perils of freedom.” - C.Today

“Partisan … advance Christian ends with extrabiblical, and sometimes unbiblical, methods. Silent churches rightly reject the partisan model but embrace a kind of quietism, resulting in silence on political issues about which Christians really do need moral and scriptural guidance.” - TGC

“Contra those who insist that “you can’t legislate morality,” it is in fact impossible for law and legislation to refrain from shaping the moral culture. One reason for this is that all laws have a moral logic built into them.” - Acton