Religion
CLARENCE, THEO AND SONNY:
In Defense of Frank Capra, Rodgers & Hammerstein, & “Theo of Golden” (Louis Markos, September 13th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative)
The core message of Capra’s films, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals, and Levi’s novel, what makes them so beloved by so many Americans, is best summed up in a rousing speech from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The honest but naïve Jefferson Smith is chosen by the corrupt political party of his state to serve out the term of their flunky in the Senate who died suddenly. Jeff takes his cues from senior Senator Paine who knew his father and whom Jeff idolizes. When Jeff learns that Paine has compromised and is in the pocket of the ruthless businessman Taylor, he speaks up, only to be framed for the very crime he tried to expose. He flees to the Lincoln Memorial, prepared to give up the fight and return to his state. There he is met by his secretary, Clarissa Saunders, who, though she has not approved of Paine’s corruption, has succumbed to cynicism and apathy.
But Jeff has woken something decent and hopeful in her. She meets him at his moment of deepest despair and challenges him to renew his faith and hope in himself and the country he loves:
Your friend, Mr. Lincoln had his Taylors and Paines. So did every other man who ever tried to lift his thought up off the ground. Odds against them didn’t stop those men. They were fools that way. All the good that ever came into this world came from fools with faith like that. You know that, Jeff. You can’t quit now. Not you. They aren’t all Taylors and Paines in Washington. That kind just throw big shadows, that’s all. You didn’t just have faith in Paine or any other living man. You had faith in something bigger than that. You had plain, decent, everyday, common rightness, and this country could use some of that. Yeah, so could the whole cockeyed world, a lot of it.
Rarely has the true, optimistic but realistic, idealistic but conservative, quixotic but practical ethos of America been so clearly stated. There is evil in the world that is manipulated by self-aggrandizing individuals, but there is also a goodness and a rightness in people that can overcome the corruption. Good is stronger than evil, but it too often lacks focus, confidence, and vision. There is no Rousseauvian denial of original sin here. Sin is real and predatory, and no one is immune from its ravages. But there is a bigger picture, a larger hope that we have lost sight of. We need fools—dare I say holy fools—like Jefferson Smith to wake us up to what we know is true. The villains are so brash and bold that they cow us into believing that they are the majority, that their theories and methods are unassailable, that we cannot resist their will. They give us only two options: Join the team or be crushed. Jeff finds a third way.
Recognizing our Fallenness does not exempt us from trying to be decent, even loving, towards one another.
DOLLYOLOGY (profanity alert):
Dolly’s theology was love (Brandon Ambrosino, August 28, 2026, Christian Century)
There’s a certain kind of Christian for whom faith begins with an exam (and doesn’t grow much beyond that). Their salvation depends on getting theological answers correct: Is the Son co-eternal with the Father? Does God’s knowledge of the future jeopardize human’s free will? Are the original copies of Scripture free from error?
But there are Christians who are not that concerned about these questions and nevertheless have decided to follow Jesus. Christians like, you know, the first generations of Jesus’s followers. To them, following Jesus meant trusting the God he trusted, meant continuing his ministry to the sick and the poor, meant never giving their complete allegiance to an earthly ruler, meant hoping for God’s future. I think this is the kind of Christian Dolly was. It’s the kind of person Jesus was—the kind of person he calls his followers to become.
I’m a theologian. I’m paid to overthink nebulous, inside-baseball theological ideas, ones that most of Jesus’s followers haven’t heard about and probably wouldn’t ever care to discuss. I think theology is important. Theology is a gift to the church and the world the church is called to serve. But when I start to get bigheaded about my job, as if I’m part of an exclusive group that has been nominated by God to protect Christianity, I’m forced to remind myself that Jesus decided to build God’s kingdom with fishermen and sex workers, that he preferred to tell simple stories without opening a textbook, and that his God will not be bound by my ideas even when power-wielding, self-authorizing groups of educated people call them “orthodox” and “canonical.”
He eventually made His own theology rather easy to comprehend, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”
THE CROSS IS UNCOMFORTABLE:
Christianity is Harder Than We Pretend it is (Stephen Mattson, June 29, 2026, Relevant)
Too often, when people are expecting—and want—to meet God, churches instead present an illusion, a tempting escape from reality.
Surprisingly, many people don’t reject Christianity because they’ve given up on God. Instead, they’ve given up on the people and things that represent God. They don’t hate Jesus, they just become tired of not finding Him within Christian culture.
As Christians, we sometimes mistakenly try to compensate for God by presenting our faith as easier than it really is. We cover up the ugliness and hardship of authentic faith.
But while following Christ is beautiful and worthwhile, disappointment, pain, suffering, betrayal and hurt are also a part of life, and Christians aren’t immune or excluded from these horrors. Contrary to a life of ease, comfort and luxury, following Jesus demands sacrifice, honesty, vulnerability, conflict and a lifetime dedicated to loving others. This is really hard—a commitment not meant to be taken lightly.
Given that Christ failed, the rest of us will too. Embracing the struggle anyway is the point.
LOVE ONE ANOTHER:
What if mercy matters more than empathy?: Christian compassion begins not with imagining another person’s pain but with recognizing our shared dependence on grace. (Melissa Florer-Bixler, June 22, 2026, Christian Century)
Unlike the evangelicals who denounce empathy as a sin, Bloom doesn’t believe we should stop trying to understand others’ emotions or stop acting politically with the care of those we don’t understand in mind. Instead, Bloom is ambivalent about the moral weight we assign to empathy. Empathy can improve social cohesion and is a building block for good moral reasoning. And, as I have experienced, empathy can be marred by bias, or it can focus our attention on one person rather than on the social or political forces that harm all of us. Treating empathy as a silver bullet, our highest moral good, is doomed to fail us at ethically crucial moments.
But I have a harder time agreeing with Bloom’s conclusion: Instead of empathy, we should prize moral decisions based on compassionate but deliberative reasoning. Compassion, Bloom explains, doesn’t rely on my ability to discern someone’s feelings accurately. Whereas empathy is just as likely to leave us overwhelmed and fleeing from another person’s pain, compassion considers the other’s needs, takes them into account, and responds in kind. I may not know what it feels like to be facing starvation, and I may find it impossible to get inside the experience of someone struggling with addiction, but I can rationally assess others’ needs and respond.
I suspect that rationality is freighted with many of the same problems as empathy. How someone presents information changes how I understand the ethical stakes of a decision. Our rationality itself is bounded—no one has access to every piece of information before deciding. And I’m certain that cognitive bias affects what I believe is rational decision-making: I look for proof to validate my already existing beliefs every time I fill out my bracket for March Madness.
Thomas Aquinas understood the complexities of following Jesus, who taught us to love strangers while also sensing the strong pull of loving relationships with those closest to us. After all, we simply have more opportunities to love those in our nearest orbit. Because of this, we can’t devise a universal rule to guide every decision we make about caring for others. Instead, we can orient our decisions within the love of God, which, unlike our emotions or rationality, is not constrained by scarcity. Love is drawn from an inexhaustible well. The more we drink, the more like it we become. Mercy is the activation of this love. I am merciful because I am a creature to whom God has extended mercy, indefinitely and perfectly.
NO CREATION, NO UNIVERSALISM:
Reading the Declaration of Independence as Holy Text: How the American creed emerged—and evolved—over 250 years (Kathryn Lofton, 6/08/26, Yale Review)
To achieve independence in 1776, the founders needed people besides themselves to believe in it and practice it. The message of their Philadelphia story could have been many things. Social coherence is something religion provides, often through repeating a story and asserting its moral. Creed is the word scholars use for those incantatory phrases that convey and perform adherence. all Men aRe cReated equal is a creed, in gOd we tRust another. libeRty is a third. Saying a creed publicizes commitment, claims distinction, and tests orthodoxy. A person can have a creed they describe as personal, but a creed is ultimately corporate, something other people can hear and repeat back: “Me too.”
ROUTINE:
A Prayer for the Grace of Ordinary Things (Vicar, 6/07/26, Country Squire)
I have been thinking lately about the grace of ordinary things. Not the grand gestures or the great events, but the small, steady, faithful routines that hold our lives together. The kettle boiling at exactly the same time each morning. The robin that sings from the same branch of the apple tree. The way a well-oiled gate swings shut without a squeak. These things ask nothing of us but attention. And in return, they give us something precious: the quiet assurance that the world still works, still turns, still offers its small mercies to anyone with eyes to see.
The countryside teaches this lesson better than any sermon.
NEVER BE YOU:
That Hideous Narcissism: All in all, the modern self is remarkably free and remarkably miserable. Liberated from limits and boundaries, we find we are not walking toward anything — only away from something. (Eddie LaRow, June 1, 2026, Mere Orthodoxy)
So here are some ways the narcissistic self is expressed today.
Authenticity
The person seeks their true self within themselves not from without. “Be yourself.” “Find your truth.” “Live authentically.” Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity, observed that authenticity has come to mean moving against the current of conventional moral authority rather than with it. To do what is expected is insincere; to transgress is to be truly oneself. Part of this is the effect of Critical Theory, which views even self-expression through the lens of power dynamics. The self as authentic interior dominates conversations around gender and identity — the true self is hidden within and needs to be expressed outward.
The entirety of morality consists of suppressing the authentic self.
ALL SCIENCE LEADS BACK TO FAITH:
Consciousness Researchers Are Tripping: Michael Pollan’s journey into the mind (Kit Wilson, May 26, 2026, Commonweal)
Hurlburt claims that, in fifty years of experience sampling, his most important finding is simply how little we’re actually aware of the details of our inner experiences. Pollan supplements this with an elegant passage on William James’s magnificent lecture “The Stream of Thought,” in which James attempts to draw attention to the strange, swirling, constantly half-forming and half-dissolving nature of our conscious experiences: the both-there-and-not sensation of trying to remember a forgotten name; the protolinguistic feeling of intending to say something before you do; the “auras,” “halos,” “accentuations,” “associations,” “suffusions,” “feelings of tendency,” “premonitions,” and “psychic overtones” that accompany all our more code-like, sentence-friendly, and determinate thoughts. Pollan writes:
To read James’s heroic attempt to limn the stream of consciousness in all its nuance, strangeness, and paradox is to realize how much violence is done to the experience in the name of consciousness science…. How could we ever accept the idea that consciousness is reducible to information, to computable bits or pixels? How could the concept of information ever capture or convey something like the aura or halo of a thought, or its familiarity, or the “fringe of unarticulated affinities” linking two thoughts, or the afterglow of a thought and its coloring of a thought to come?
Indeed. All of this is reinforced by Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist who specializes in “spontaneous thought”: mind-wandering, daydreaming, creative thinking, and the mysterious thoughts that seem to come to us from nowhere. As she points out, almost all consciousness science is focused only on our most explicitly conscious thoughts. But these are rare, discrete moments extracted from a vast, nebulous background—like tiny raindrops condensing inside a huge amorphous cloud of vapor. This background, Christoff Hadjiilieva estimates, accounts for something like half of what the mind is doing at any one moment. This highlights the absurdity of trying to produce thinking machines by focusing only on surface material like language and perception.
Everything then culminates in a kind of psychedelic punchline. Pollan meets Christof Koch, an American cognitive scientist and one of the true giants in the world of consciousness research, most famous for espousing integrated information theory—which posits, rather abstrusely, that consciousness arises in any physical system sufficiently interconnected and recursive. Back in 1998, Koch famously bet the philosopher David Chalmers that scientists would find neural correlates of consciousness within twenty-five years. In 2023, Koch graciously conceded, and gave Chalmers, the man who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness,” his promised case of Madeira.
In the years since, Koch has become increasingly suspicious of purely physical accounts of consciousness, his skepticism reinforced by recent experiments with psychedelics. Pollan quotes from a conversation with Koch after his return from an ayahuasca retreat in Brazil: “It was extraordinary…. I accessed this universal mind…. It was what Aldous Huxley described in The Doors of Perception. There was no self. There was Mind at Large.”
Koch is not the only scientist Pollan talks with who admits to a drug-induced revelation. A little earlier, the neuroscientist Kingson Man describes his experiences with a psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT:
I disappeared, fell out of time, and then came back with the realization that everything in the world is love. I know, ridiculous! As a scientist, there’s no reasoning about it. But I understood for the first time that everything is connected by the same substance, and that substance is love…. And I realized there’s more going on in consciousness than I can hope to build with my dinky little machine. A robot can act like it’s in love, but it’s still a puppet being pulled by strings.
Of course, there’s something funny about these drug-induced breakthroughs, and it should all be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. Nonetheless, I found it striking that what these trips offer scientists—setting aside the wilder flights of fancy—are often simple reminders of something that was always there. In an email to Pollan, Koch likens his experience to a famous philosophical thought experiment in which someone who is colorblind is able to see color for the first time. A reductionist explanation involving photons and receptors wouldn’t be enough. “Wouldn’t you go around for the rest of your life with the certainty that you had experienced something utterly real that demanded an explanation? So it is with me and my mystical experience.”
Even Kingson Man’s more stereotypically hippie-style revelation could be seen as a reminder of something we forget only because it’s ever-present: love really is real, and irreducible to any physical mechanism. This is particularly easy to forget when you’re professionally trained to filter out the familiar—but remarkable and mysterious—experiences we have every second of our waking lives, and to think only in terms of the theoretical grids we place on top of them.
It’s all just footnotes to Hume
SHOW THEM THE MONEY:
In Flint, Cash for Pregnant Women Leads to Better Outcomes for Babies (Roni Caryn Rabin, May 27, 2026, NY Times)
The new report offered one of the most optimistic recent assessments of cash transfer programs. Results from other similar programs across the country have been mixed. But the Flint initiative is one of several that target pregnancy and the first year of a baby’s life, when income often dips just as expenses increase. This critical period influences a child’s development and long-term health trajectory, said Dr. Hanna, who is also associate dean of public health at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.
The study evaluated the outcomes of some 4,500 births in Flint between 2021 and 2025, and compared them with those in similar, matched cities in Michigan. Before the program’s implementation, rates of premature birth and low birth weight had been increasing in Flint.
Researchers would have expected those rates “to increase even more, because the rates were rising year after year and rising in the matched cities, but instead, Flint’s rates went lower,” said Dr. Sumit Agarwal, a physician and economist at the University of Michigan and the paper’s first author. He and the study’s other authors concluded that the program effectively reduced Flint’s preterm birth rate by 2.7 percentage points and low birth weight rate by 4.2 percentage points.
Previous studies have found that Rx Kids was also associated with fewer evictions, better maternal health and a drop in welfare investigations of child maltreatment. The program has now expanded to 42 communities in Michigan.