The Stump
Brethren of the Same Principle: A Few Words Toward a Better Politics
They, for the first time, saw each other’s faces. They shook hands. They gave each other cigarettes, beer, champagne. Exchanged buttons from their coats. One German gave an English soldier a haircut.…
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To Make Housing Affordable, Act Locally
Even if you spend only a fraction of your day monitoring the news, you’ve probably caught wind of the nation’s affordable housing crisis. Disproportionately affecting both the poor and young professionals in…
Liberated for What
This piece is adapted slightly from a speech given at Spring Arbor University in Michigan at September's FPR Conference. The sexual revolution as we understand it today was not originally on the…
Notes on Nike
An honest question: why was Zoolander III: Kendall Jenner and Pepsi Notice Some Serious Issues laughed into shameful corners of the internet immediately while Colin Kaepernick’s recent advertisement with Nike, that great…
A Primer on Digital Thinking Part 2: Eliminating the Human Element
In Part 1, I outlined the basic difference between counting and measuring and gave some examples of how data is not always objectively derived. Now I want to move the conversation to…
The Facebookification of Local Politics: Extending the Wall of the Bathroom Stall
In 2014, Cambridge Analytica used an app called thisisyourdigitallife to surreptitiously obtain data from 50 million Facebook accounts. They then used all of this information in 2016 to help Donald Trump’s campaign create…
A Primer on Digital Thinking: Part 1 Counting and Measuring
The basic distinction between digital and analog is that digital means you count something and analog means you measure something. We can easily count discrete objects like apples, oranges, and people, or…
Culture as the Discovery of Meaning
The resurgent debate between Christians that defend classical liberalism and those that critique liberalism tout court has been deeply instructive. This debate, however, threatens to obscure a deeply held alliance and undermines the…
Chesterton and Belloc are not Enough
In preparing a new volume of essays titled Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (1936), Allen Tate and Herbert Agar sought to extend the political argument for agrarianism beyond what had…
Free Labor: The Liberation Theology of Capitalism
Capitalism as Theology In his seminal work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak provides his readers with a “Theology of Democratic Capitalism.”1 Now, some might find his theology a bit eccentric,…
Catastrophe, Technology, Limits, and Localism
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Charles C. Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to bulk up this…
Social Isolation as the Fruit of Liberalism
Loneliness is on the rise. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among young people. Our social media networks may number in the hundreds, even thousands, but it appears that…
A Flexible Disposition
In 2018, to discuss America’s future is to discuss uncertainty. It is true, of course, that talking about the future—a predictive game dependent on chance as much as it is on foresight—is…
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