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Politics has become a dirty word. “It’s all politics” is often declared as though the phrase itself explains—and excuses—something ethically deplorable. To say “it’s just politics” is to trivialize what is happening,  dismissing it as something relatively useless when compared with real people doing real work. To politicize an issue is commonly understood as turning… Read more

Our city remains far too icy to risk a walk. I suspect my Tuesday morning class will be canceled, so I am going to cover one small part of it in this post. We would have studied the Beatitudes as presented in Matthew, chapter 5, but today I want to focus on just one: “Blessed… Read more

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship in 1937, at a time when much of the German church had embraced a form of Christian nationalism compatible with Hitler’s vision for Germany’s future. In that book, Bonhoeffer reminded his students that they could not pledge allegiance to German nationalism and to the gospel of Jesus Christ… Read more

My conservative friend Fred recently wrote that he is anxious about losing the values of our Western European heritage—values that have contributed so much not only to the development of America, but to the world as a whole. It is not an anxiety I share, but it is an anxiety worth taking seriously, because it… Read more

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a national holiday that will be observed on January 19. Dr. King was assassinated fifty-eight years ago while engaged in the work of lifting up the lives of low-income sanitation workers in Memphis. That work was not incidental to his vocation; it was a natural extension of his lifelong… Read more

The Gestapo-like invasion of Minnesota is an unmistakable sign that this administration intends to impose a draconian form of authoritarian rule on the United States. The failure of Republican congressional leadership to offer anything other than mumbled excuses reveals a profound absence of moral integrity. Only history will fully unravel how the nation arrived at… Read more