The governor of a large state,
if speaking for the E.U., risks not only undercutting federal officials who can
speak for the E.U., but also subtly orienting federal policy in the interest of
that state rather than the entire union. It is important, therefore, that the
president of the European Council be tasked with speaking publicly for the
Council, rather than usurped.
The full essay is at "Big States in the European Council."
We tend to separate religion from
skepticism, and we associate science with evidence even though of religion and
science, only science is open to revision. Kierkegaard remarked that there is
something absurd about religious belief, and yet a religionist should believe,
and even without any evidence to back up the absurd. In fact, in the early-modern
period in the West, religious belief was often assumed to have a higher
epistemological status than philosophy and science even though the latter two
are supported by the strictures of reason and the support of empirical
evidence, respectively. I submit that it is precisely to the extent that religious
beliefs are held to be certain that we should be modest about them in terms of
what we can know. According to Peter Adamson, religions were once very open to
skepticism, whereas the Aristotelian philosophers were certain of their
epistemological certainty. Considering that varied assumptions have been
applied by philosophers to their craft, they should be weary of their own
claims of having achieved epistemological certainty. I contend that
religionists should get back to being more tolerant of, and even invite
skepticism, even within their own minds. Being humbly aware of falling short,
both as an individual and as a species, of grasping true religious knowledge as
it is, undeluded by our own limitations (e.g., opinions), is rarely the case as
religionists make declarations as if with epistemological certainty.
The full essay is at "Skepticism within Religion."
The Quorum is a high-level
governing body in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Quorum “helps
set church policy while overseeing the many business interests of what is known
widely as the Mormon Church.”[1]
On December 27, 2025, Jeffrey R. Holland, “a high-ranking official . . . who
was next in line to become the faith’s president,” died.[2]
He was 85. To be at that age and yet next in line to lead a major Christian
denomination is a sign of just how tilted toward the elderly the leadership of
that Church was at the time. Almost exactly three months earlier, Russell M.
Nelson, the then-sitting president of the denomination, died at the age of 101.
Dallin H. Oaks, at the age of 93, became the next president. These ages make 75,
the mandatory retirement age for Roman Catholic bishops, look young, though
Pope John Paul II died at 84 and Pope Francis died at 88—both men while in
office. Especially in Christianity, whose Gospels depict Jesus and his
disciples as much younger men, the question of whether an aged leadership unduly
foists conservatism on what in the Gospels is characterized as a radical
religious movement.
The full essay is at "Conservatism in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles."
In the film, The Scarlet and the Black (1983), Gregory Peck and Christopher Plummer face off as Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and Col. Herbert Kapper at the end of the film when the Nazi head of police in Rome abruptly changes his tune in challenging the Catholic priest no longer by threats, but by appealing to the priest’s faith of humble compassion applied even to one’s enemies so O’Flaherty will extend mercy to Kapper’s wife and children, who would otherwise fall into the hands of the Allied troops advancing into Rome. Before that dialogue, O’Flaherty and Pope Pius XII subtly debate whether the pope had been right in compromising with Hitler in order to keep the Catholic Church intact in Nazi Germany. The film can thus be viewed in light of the potential of the medium of film to convey and even thrash out contending theological ideas.
The full essay is at "The Scarlet and the Black."
That severe, systematic inflictions of suffering on whole peoples were going on in the world even on Christmas Day in 2025 did not require a papal announcement for people the world over to be informed of those atrocities. Russia’s military incursion in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza had been going on with international impunity for years. The suffering in Yemen and Sudan was less well-known, but substantial nonetheless. Speaking out against the sordid state-aggressors on the first Christmas of his pontificate, the pope provided an alternative basis for international relations that is so antithetical to military invasion and genocide that the message could seem utopian and thus practically of no use whatsoever. Because “might makes right” had made such unimpeded “progress” even in becoming the default and status-quo, the principle of humble compassion to the humanity to one’s detractors and even outright enemies could seem like a fairy tale.
The full essay is at "Pope Leo's First Christmas Message."
It is ironic that even though
European political theorists, including Immanuel Kant, Johannes Althusius, and
Kenneth Wheare, made substantial contributions on the topic of federalism, even
political leaders in the E.U. as late as 2025 were stumbling over the basics,
getting the very concept wrong. Unfortunately, that has caused journalists to
trip and fall too, leaving E.U. citizens grappling over the apparent problem of
being citizens both of their state and the E.U. even though, according to
former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi spoke in 2025 in favor of “’pragmatic
federalism’ as the political conditions for a true, federal union do not exist
in the E.U. at the moment.”[1]
The claims that “pragmatic federalism” is somehow not indicative of “true”
federalism, and, moreover, that somehow the E.U. has states that are
semi-sovereign (as the E.U. itself has exclusive competences) and yet federalism
does not apply are patently absurd. Draghi was confusing the politics of the
moment, in which the anti-federalist, Euroskeptic ideology was still too
powerful for more governmental sovereignty to be moved to the federal level
from the states, with whether the E.U. had a federal system already. In other
words, “political conditions” are distinct from whether the E.U. has a federal
system of public governance. Draghi’s assertion is all the more astounding not
only because of his governmental experience at the federal level, but also
because the dual-sovereignty (of the states and the Union) means that the E.U.
fits within the category of modern federalism rather than confederalism (using
Wheare’s terminology). Europeans have quite understandably been confused in
trying to classify the E.U. away from the pull of the anti-federalist ideology
in Europe.
The full essay is at "On the E.U.'s 'Pragmatic' Federalism."
1. Sandor Zsiros, “The EU Wants to End the Era of National Vetoes—But It’s Complicated,” Euronews.com, 23 December, 2025.
The medium of film can treat organizational, societal, and global ethical problems either from one standpoint, which is appropriate if the assignment of blame for immoral conduct is clear (e.g., the Nazis), or by presenting both sides of an argument so to prompt the viewers to think about the ethically complex problem. This second approach is useful if it is not clear whether a character or a given conduct is unethical. When it is obvious which characters or actions are unethical, a film can still stimulate ethical reasoning and judgment by drawing attention to unethical systems as distinct from individuals and their respective conduct in the film. The film, Spotlight (2015), which is a true story, takes the position that Roman Catholic priests who molested and raped children in the Boston Archdiocese in Massachusetts behaved ethically. The dramatic tension in the film is set up when the chief editor of the Boston Globe, Liev Schreiber, tells the paper’s investigative “spotlight” managers that the story will not go to press until the system that enabled Cardinal Law and others to cover up many child-rapist priests by transferring them to other parishes is investigated. “We’re going after the system,” Liev says in keeping the story under wraps until the entire informal system that has enabled the rapists to continue to lead parishes.
The full essay is at "Spotlight."
In the film, The Apocalypse (2002), the Apostle John is a prisoner at an island-prison because he is a Christian. He is having visions of heaven in the last of days and Valerio, another prisoner is dutifully writing what John dictates so various church congregations can know of John’s revelations. He is esteemed so much by other Christians that he feels pressure to steer them to God’s truth. Too much esteem, I submit, is being directed to John, as he is, as he admits, only a human being, though he does get caught up in his own direct access to God, as in being able to know the will of God. This is a temptation for any religionist, especially religious leaders. Although subtly, the film conveys John’s over-reaches though without having another character explicitly refer to them as such.
The full essay is at "The Apocalypse."
Hegel looked at human history
as developing through dialectics resolved at a more advanced point in a
trajectory of expanding human freedom. It may be in the history of religion
that less superstition evinces an evolution of a different sort. The monotheism
of the Abrahamic religions came out of a polytheistic context, but it is a more
difficult matter to claim that monotheism represents a development of human
religion historically because polytheism has continued. Even though some contemporary
interpreters of Hinduism’s main text, the Bhagavad-Gita, claim erroneously
that the god Krishna being the supreme deity in that text means that it is
monotheist even though in that text, Krishna himself acknowledges that people
pray to other gods and goddesses that exist. Rather than maintain that monotheism
is an advancement on polytheism, I submit that conceptual contradictions
between contending religious claims in any religion can be surmounted, as transcended,
though with the caveat that in polytheism, contradictions have a firmer
grounding even though they too are to be transcended if religion itself is permitted
to evolve.
The full essay is at "Renunciation vs. Dutiful Action in Hinduism."
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is a Biblical saying that is perhaps as well known as it is typically ignored in the midst of passion. Even the advice that revenge is better served up as a cold dish rather than immediately when the grill is still hot is difficult to heed. The 1975 film, The Count of Monte-Cristo, can be likened to a “how-to” recipe book on how to exact revenge against multiple people, one after the other until the sense dawns on the avenger that one’s one life has been utterly consumed by the desire and then feels empty once the deserved suffering has been sufficiently inflicted. It is admittedly very difficult to walk away from a grievous injustice if the agent of the harm is allowed to evade suffering that is deserved. In the film, however, Abbé Faria, a Christian priest who has been unjustly held in an island prison for fifteen years, nonetheless urges Edmond Dantes, whose prison cell is connected to Faria’s tunnel, to resist the temptation to ruin the lives of the four men who had unjustly imprisoned Edmund, including De Villefort, Danglars, and General Fernand Mondego. In the end, Dantes, as the Count of Monte-Crisco, pays dearly for having gone down the road of vengeance. Even if the suffering inflicted on the unjust is deserved ethically, distinctly religious implications should be considered lest avengers are left existentially empty rather than as one might expect, finally at peace. The Christian notion of the Kingdom of God is prominent in this distinctly religious regard.
The full essay is at "The Count of Monte Cristo."
Words matter; they may not break bones, but they can wreak havoc if they are used carelessly or ideologically. Political labels can stick, and, if inaccurate, they can result in people having an incorrect impression of what something or someone is, politically. The war that began in North America in 1861, for example, has typically been labeled as a civil war, but it may be more accurately labeled as the C.S.A.-U.S.A. War because the Confederate States of America did not want to take over the U.S.A.; it was not as if the C.S.A.’s goal was to conquer and government the U.S.A. Having established itself as a functioning political entity even though U.S. President Lincoln refused to acknowledge the political existence of the C.S.A., that union could be said to have existed and been at war with the U.S.A. from 1861-1865. Two unions of states were at war with each other; it was not as if the Union Army was at war with individual seceded states. The C.S.A. had a government apart from the state governments. So “the war between the states” is an inaccurate label because it denies the existence of the two unions. But the common label of a civil war is also problematic because two political factions were not fighting each other for control of the U.S.A. If this criticism seems unusual and even perhaps rather strange, the reason may be because the victor’s labeling of the war has been so overwhelming. My point is that this does not mean that the labeling is accurate just because it has been widely accepted. Similarly, the labeling by E.U. officials (including the E.U.’s ambassador to the U.S.) of the European Union as a bloc is not accurate.
The full essay is at "Proliferating Blocs."
In late 2025, the E.U. Commission presented its first European Affordable Housing Plan. The E.U.’s involvement in “social housing,” which translates into federal funds being used to provide housing beyond homeless shelters for people who cannot afford to house themselves, implies that the programs of the states had been insufficient. The U.S. could take a lesson from the Commission’s plan, which is cleverly multi-pronged in tackling the societal problem. Both in the E.U. and U.S., both federal and state funds were needed even in 2025 when neither economy was in recession. It is better to increase the supply of affordable housing when times are good than when unemployment is soaring. This is an exception in the E.U. to the usual pattern wherein the E.U. increases its competencies, or enumerated powers, in periods of one crisis or another. Russia’s multi-year invasion of Ukraine, which borders the E.U., and the Union’s foreign and defense activity demonstrate how European integration has typically been enhanced by crisis rather than when times are good.
The full essay is at "Homelessness in the E.U."
After 25 years negotiating with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, the E.U.’s Commission sought to secure passage of the massive trade-deal in the European Council and the Parliament by the end of 2025. Even though the vote is by qualified-majority voting rather than unanimity in both chambers, one state that was against the treaty sought to delay the vote in the Council, which represents states rather than E.U. citizens. The Commission rightly pushed back on the tactic because for one state in opposition to be able to put off a vote is tantamount to having a veto, which a mechanism only for E.U. competencies that are subject to unanimous approval in the Council.
The full essay is at "On the E.U.'s Mercosur Deal."
The film, The Reader (2008),
captures a frame of mind that may be so frequently overlooked when it is observed
because it is so bizarre in its impact on reasoning that it difficult to explain,
let alone grasp for what it is. The phenomenon is not of artifice; rather, it is
a natural vulnerability of the human mind, or brain, due to its susceptibility
to ideology that is highly unethical in its content, including a circumscribed
and even warped mental framework and very unethical prescriptions for conduct. The
ideology at issue in the film is that of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1933 to
1945. The truism that absolute power
corrupts absolutely does not fully account for the cognitive warping that is
evinced by Hanna Schmidt during her trial in the film.
The full essay is at "The Reader."
By invoking Article 122 of the
E.U.’s basic law, a clause that had been used most significantly during the Coronavirus
pandemic and in the 2022 energy crisis, the E.U. in December, 2025 finally
circumvented the twice-threatened veto by the state of Hungary and indefinitely
froze €210 billion of assets of the Russian Central Bank that had been within
the E.U.’s territory since Russia began its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine
nearly four years earlier. I contend that the European Court of Justice, the E.U.’s
supreme court, could apply a rational basis in a judicial review of the triggering
of the emergency-conditioned article, especially because the Commission
invoked the article in order to obviate Hungary’s threatened veto. Because every
E.U. state except for Belgium and Hungary were for freezing the assets until Russia
such time as Russia ends its militaristic aggression and compensates Ukraine
financially for damages the Belgian and Hungarian state governments were
violating the informal norm of consensus in the European Council and the
Council of Ministers. Like the U.S. Senate, the European Council, which also
represents the states, is like a club of sorts. The problem facing the
Commission is that violating a norm is not a legal basis for obviating a
threatened state-veto by invoking an emergency clause of the E.U.’s basic law, especially
if no emergency actually exists after nearly four years of the invasion. Even
though I am personally in favor of the E.U. obviating Hungary’s serial obstructionism
that may be, at least in part, retaliation against President Von der Leyen’s
Commission for having penalized the Hungarian government financially for having
violated E.U. law, legal reasoning should not succumb to the gravity of the “black
hole” of personal opinion. There may be nothing
so much like a god as a general on a battlefield, with power over life and
death, but neither the European Commission nor myself is a general. In short,
the Commission’s legal justification in invoking Article 122 is tenuous at
best, even though countering Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s abuse of his state’s veto-power
in the European Council and the Council of Ministers was needed for the E.U. to
be able to function within its enumerated competencies (i.e., powers).
The full essay is at "Immobilizing E.U. Holdings of Russian Assets."
Both in the E.U. and U.S., the
member-states are semi-sovereign, and are even guaranteed all residual
sovereignty that is not in any of the enumerated competencies (i.e., powers) of
the respective unions and the states. Europeans are smart to have multiple
avenues for the state governments in the European Council and the Council of
Ministers so those governments can protect themselves against encroachment by
the Commission. To be sure, these safeguards go too far, especially given the sheer
number of states even by the mid-2020s, in giving each state a veto especially
on important matters in which qualified-majority voting does not apply. In
other words, the safeguards against federal encroachment in the E.U. are
excessive as long as each state can wield its veto against federal policies, legislation,
and regulations. Regarding the latter, the directive means provides each state
with some latitude. I suspect that the Europeans who constructed the E.U.’s
federal system were in part fearful of federal encroachment because so much of
that had already built-up in the U.S., where federal consolidation had become a
threat to the governmental sovereignty of the member-states, as if they were
just regions rather than republics holding even more sovereignty, on parchment
at least, than does Congress and the federal president. So, it is worth taking
not of the rare instances in which a state legislature pushes back against
threats from the U.S. president on a competency (i.e., enumerated power)
reserved by the states. The rejection by
the Indiana Senate of U.S. President Trump’s pressure to accept new districts
for U.S. House representatives from Indiana—a map in which the Republican Group
would likely pick up two seats—is important because Congressional-district maps
are the prerogative of the states rather than an encroaching federal executive.
The full essay is at "U.S. Presidential Encroachment."
As if having elected
representatives and political parties in the European Parliament were not
enough evidence that the E.U. has been a political union all along, the distinctly
political role of the E.U. with regard to Ukraine amid the Russian
invasion renders the E.U. political not merely institutionally in regard to representative
democracy, which is a political rather than an economic system. Also, that the
European Commission has exclusive competency on trade does not eclipse the
union’s distinctly political activity. That the E.U. agreed to move forward
informally with Ukraine’s accession request even though the state of Hungary
was formally vetoing the accession demonstrates a political function or role of
the European Union.
The full essay is at "The E.U."
Challenging the dichotomy
between reading a book and watching a movie, a film can include writing lessons
within a narrative that is oriented to a romance and the business of a
publishing house signing a writer for a second book. In the film, Shadows in the Sun (2005),
Jeremy, a young employee of a major publisher, is sent by his brass, business-minded
boss, Andrew Benton, to sign Weldon Parish, who lives hundreds of miles away
from London and has retired from writing due to his fear of failure. In
resisting Jeremy’s efforts to manipulate him to sign, Parish agrees to talk
shop with the young writer. Although by no means a major part of the film,
Weldon’s brief lessons and exercises can be of use to viewers. Film can indeed serve
the cause of writing rather than merely draw readers away from books to the
screen. In fact, astute viewers can critique the brief lessons and thus
actively make use of film for intellectual and vocational purposes. Going
through the lessons and exercises in the film can illustrate such an active
engagement.
The full essay is at "Shadows in the Sun."
Systemic corruption means not
only that a department or agency has an organizational culture that allows for
and may even laud corruption, but also that a city hall, as well as larger
jurisdictions such as member-states and even federal agencies may be enabling
the corruption by looking the other way and even lying to cover-up the lower-level
corruption. A study at Florida Atlantic University published in the Journal
of Criminal Justice identifies 24 categories of police misconduct in Florida
from 2012 to 2023. Even though it is tempting to highlight violent illegal acts
by police employees, lying regarding criminal law and refusing to take reports
of criminal activity may be more detrimental because such misconduct is probably
more common than is the violent sort. If so, the extent of corruption and the
underlying false sense of entitlement by police patrol-employees and even their
supervisors may be vastly understated in the United States.
The full essay is at "Local Police Enabled in Florida."
In the 11th
century, Christians were not welcome in Persia, so in the film, The Physician (2013), Rob
Cole, a Christian, pretends to be Jewish in order to travel from Western Europe
to study at the medical school of Ibn Sina, a famous physician in Isfahan. He
eventually reveals his religion as that of “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” when
he is on trial before the local imam. The Jews there doubtlessly feel used and
betrayed. As interesting as interreligious controversy can be, I contend that
the nature of Cole’s crime is more significant from the standpoint of religion
itself. In short, the film illustrates what bad effects are likely to come from
committing a category mistake with respect to religion and another domain.
Whether conflating distinct domains or erasing the boundary between them,
category mistakes had diminished the credibility of religion as being
over-reaching by the time that the film was made. As for the matter of interreligious
differences, the sheer pettiness by which the three Abrahamic religions that
share the same deity have made mole hills into untraversable mountains is
hardly worthy of attention, whereas that which makes religion as a domain of phenomena
unique and thus distinct from other, even related domains, is in need of
further work. The film could have done more in this regard.
The full essay is at "The Physician."
Organized or institutional religion as the Roman Catholic Church is in the background in the 2019 European film, Hope Gap. Even with such names as Grace and Angela, religious connotations are present. In fact, the film can be interpreted, at least in part, as a critique on religion in general and Catholicism in particular. The medium of film can indeed play a vital role in critiquing sacred cows from the vantagepoint of an oblique angle or a safe distance.
The full essay is at "Hope Gap."
In the United States, Christmas is the last official holiday of the calendar-year, and Thanksgiving is the penultimate holiday. New Year’s Day is the first holiday of the year. Any other holidays among or between these are private rather than public holidays, and thus the public is not obliged to recognize those holidays as if they were equivalent to public holidays. Although New Year’s Day has remained safe from ideological attack, neither Thanksgiving nor Christmas have. Nevertheless, their status as official U.S. holidays has remained, at least as of 2025, and thus it remains as of then at least proper and fitting for Americans to refer to those holidays by name rather than by the denialist, passive-aggressive expression, happy holidays, which conveniently disappears even from retail clerks just in time for New Year’s because that holiday is ideologically permissible. The problem writ large is the influx of ideology trying to invalidate certain official United States holidays. By the end of 2025, the initial influx had triggered a counter-influx that is just as ideological, and thus only encircling certain (but not all) official holidays with ideology. The underlying fault lies in using the creation of a holiday to promote an ideology.
The full essay is at "Holidays at U.S. Parks."
Does the E.U. itself
instantiate a decline in European civilization? So says a National Security
Strategy for the United States released by the Trump administration in December,
2025. That report also claims that migration to Europe was in the process of
causing European nations to face “civilizational erasure.” That is to say, the
European nation-state was by the end of 2025 facing existential threats due to
the E.U. and migration. The report also highlights the loss of democracy in
Europe, due both to the E.U. usurping the governmental sovereignty of the states
and the clamping down on voices on the right in Europe. I contend that the
report contains a sufficient number of fallacies that it can reasonably be
dismissed as bias ideology under the subterfuge of national security.
The full essay is at "Is Europe in Civilizational Decline?"
As American, Ukrainian, and
Russian negotiating delegations were flying around the world in early December,
2025 to conduct various negotiating sessions, all the while without the presidents
of Russia and Ukraine meeting, it was difficult for bystanders to keep an eye
on the proverbial ball as it was being kicked around by offers and
counter-offers, and complicated by the high-profiled presence of the
businessman, Jared Kushner, who happened to be married to one of U.S. President
Trump’s daughters. Kushner was also highly visible in the negotiations on Gaza,
which almost certainly included real-estate development. To be sure, commercial
and investment deals can easily remain subterranean while the public discourse
stays on the political relations between nations, and even just the latter may
lack transparency. Democratic accountability in democratic republics as
concerning the conduct and results of foreign policy can be difficult. Especially
difficult to gauge was the hand being closely held by Russia’s President Putin.
I contend that his willingness to negotiate was consistently overestimated by
the West and Ukraine.
The full essay is at "Russia's Bottom-Line on Ukraine."
In his famous text, Leviathan,
Thomas Hobbes describes the state of nature as one of might, or raw force,
being the decider of what is rightly and determinatively so. If one person physically
harms another person such that the latter’s food may be taken by the former,
then that food belongs to the victor even without any overarching normative, or
moral, constraint that says that the food still belongs to the vanquished. If
Russia has successfully conquered a few regions of Ukraine by military means,
then those occupied lands have become part of Russia. If Israel has physically
decimated Gaza and placed its indigenous residents in concentration camps
without enough food or access to medical care, then Israel and the United States
can engage private investors on large-scale, upscale real-estate development
projects as attacks against the remaining residents in Gaza continue unabated. In
short, possession is really all that is needed to establish ownership. Might
makes right. In this system, the International Criminal Court, or ICC, simply
does not exist or is a target. Evolution has not changed human nature from the
hunter-gatherer “stage.” To be sure, not all of humanity is on board with this
sort of global order, even if guns have a way of pushing down or even silencing
the more progressive elements of the species. The Trump administration’s
attacks on the ICC represent a case in point.
The full essay is at "A Hobbesian World of Might-Makes-Right."
In The Master (2012),
Lancaster Dodd tells Freddie Quell, the man whom Lancaster wants to cure of
alcoholism and mental illness, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a
theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man.” Given Lancaster’s
presumption of infallibility concerning knowing that every human soul
has been reincarnated even for trillions of years, the end of the line would
more fittingly be, “I am a man above all (others).” With regard to being a
physician, Lancaster comes up short because he underestimates the medical
severity of Freddie’s alcoholism and his likely psychotic mental illness. Upon being
released from jail, Lancaster should realize that Freddie’s rage and
temper-tantrum in his jail cell evince mental illness of such severity that it
is lunacy to suppose that the patient can be cured by walking back and forth in
a room between a wall and a window and being sure to touch both, and by saying
“Doris” over and over again in a dyad with Lancaster’s new son-in-law. In fact,
Lancaster actually encourages Freddie’s alcoholism by asking that
Freddie continue to make his “potion,” which contains paint-thinner filtered through
bread. It is not Lancaster, but his wife, Peggy, who puts a stop to the
“booze.” From her sanity, both that of Freddie and Lancaster can be questioned.
That Lancaster is the Master of a religious cult, or “movement,” renders his mental
state particularly problematic.
The full essay is at "The Master."
“State rights” was a common
refrain by the eleven U.S. member states who sought to exit in 1861; the
underlying fear was that the exclusive competencies, or enumerated powers, of
the U.S., combined with the numerous accessions of new states, were already
compromising the power of the eleven states to protect their economies from “encroachment.”
In 1858, for instance, a tariff disadvantageous to those economies had been
passed in spite of the “Southern” objections in the U.S. Senate. Had each
member state had a veto, rather than just the ability to filibuster, the eleven
states would have been able to protect the viability of their respective
economies from encroachment by the Union. To be sure, the state rights claim
that the U.S. was still just a bloc, as had been the case from 1781-1789 under
the Articles of Confederation, was sheer denial, for the U.S. Constitution
instituted a new kind of federalism—partly national, partly international—based
on dual sovereignty, wherein both the member states and the Union have a
portion of governmental sovereignty. It is this form of federalism, “modern
federalism,” that the Europeans adopted in creating the European Union because the
E.U. has exclusive competencies. But whereas the shift made by the Americans in
the eighteenth century left the state-veto behind at the Union level, the
Europeans retained the veto, which at the very least works against the
effective operation of modern federalism. The arduous and much delayed task on
a reparations loan for Ukraine in spite of the self-interested objection—and thus
promised veto—of one state is a case in point. Even the alternative of the E.U.
issuing debt faced state-level opposition, as was the case in the U.S. in the
1790s, but in that case, the self-interested states that were relatively clear
of debt could not stop the issuance because none of those states could wield a
veto at the federal level. This is important because back then, the American
states were still widely viewed as countries by their respective inhabitants. “I
must fight for my country,” General Lee told Lincoln in 1861, referring to
Virginia. A refresher on American history could help Europeans cross the
Rubicon to a more internally consistent modern federalism. Whether Euroskepticism
or States’ Rights, the ideology, as etched into the E.U.’s Basic Law, is
responsible for Van der Leyen’s headaches in getting the E.U. to put Ukraine in
a position of strength against the Russian invaders.
The full essay is at "A Reparations Loan or Common Debt."
On America’s Thanksgiving Day, 2025, Dmytro Kuleba, a former foreign minister of Ukraine, was asked whether Ukraine’s government officials could trust American officials negotiating with the Russian officials, given the fact that Steve Witkoff, the U.S. Envoy at the time, had recently been caught coaching Kirill Dmitriev, a top Russian official, on how to get U.S. President Don Trump on the side of Putin even though the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine was still in violation of international law, which, by the way, trumps historical reasons, such as a lost Russian empire. Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine during the 1930s would seem to nullify any imperial claims from the past. Kuleba relied to the journalist’s question with, “Not really, but we do not have another America.”[1] He was really giving Europe a wake-up call, but the problem there was not a lack of consensus, but a structural deficiency in the federal system of the European Union.
The full essay is at "We Don't Have Another America."
1. Mared Gwyn Jones, “European Decision-Making on Ukraine ‘Embarrassing,’ Former Foreign Minister Kuleba Says,” Euronews.com, November 27, 2025.
Operant Conditioning in Psychology, the theory advanced by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s, holds that punishment and reinforcement can change behavior. Positive reinforcement is more likely than punishment to see a given behavior repeated. With regard to the U.S.-Russian plan announced in November, 2025, to end the war in Ukraine, E.U. officials were concerned that if Russia would benefit from the plan, Putin would be more likely to stage other invasions in Eastern Europe. Positive reinforcement financially could make invading profitable, a point that would not be lost on government officials of countries desirous of territorial expansion.
The full essay is at "Rewarding Invaders with Profit."
Should instructors themselves lead
righteous, moral lives if they are going to be allowed to teach college
students? Does the character of a teacher matter? Should a professor be
inclusive rather than exclusivist? These questions are distinct from the much
more easily answered question of whether convicted criminals should be allowed to
teach college students. Harvard’s Larry Summers, the last U.S. Treasury
Secretary of the Clinton presidency, a president of Harvard University, and a
professor there, came to personify these moral questions in November, 2025 after
Congress released a trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges with Summers. Besides
resigning from the board of OpenAI, Summers attempted to continue teaching, but
then suddenly announced that he was taking a leave of absence from Harvard even
though the semester had just a few weeks remaining (including Thanksgiving
break). If as I suspect Harvard’s administration pressured him to bow out, at
least temporarily in a leave of absence, the irony would be that such a sordid
organizational culture casted one of its own kind away. I contend that Summers’
case at Harvard is more complex than first meets the eye.
The full essay is at "Larry Summers' Emails to Epstein."
As “part of the Vatican’s
efforts to reach out beyond the Catholic Church to engage with the secular
world,” Pope Leo spoke with actors and directors on November 15, 2025 about the
ability of film “to inspire and unite.”[1]
He spoke to the filmmakers about film itself as an art, and what it can do
socially. What it can do in a distinctively religious sense was oddly left out.
I submit that leaving out how film can contribute to spirituality wherein a transcendent
is explicitly included, while instead discussing the social functions of film
not only limits the potential of film, but also ironically marginalizes a significant
potential of film ironically in the pope’s own field.
The full essay is at "Pope Leo on the Cinema."
1. Nicole Winfield, “Pope Leo XIV Celebrates Cinema with Hollywood Stars and Urges Inclusion of Marginal Voices,” APNews.com, November 15, 2025.
The film, My Name is Bernadette (2011), focuses, almost as an obsession, on the question of
whether the girl “actually” saw the Virgin Mary in a series of visions at
Lourdes. All too often, miracles are treated as ends in themselves, rather than
as pointers to something deeper. Even the girl in the visual and auditory
(albeit only to Bernadette) apparition identified itself only in terms of a
supernatural miracle, the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception. I contend that Bernadette’s
awe-inspiring spirituality visually conveyed on screen, and Monsignor Forcade’s
spiritually-insightful advice to Bernadette as to her functions in her upcoming
life as a nun is more important than the miracles, even from the standpoint of
religion. In other words, the story-world of the film, which is based on the
true story of Bernadette at Lourdes, is a good illustration of a what happens
when everyone in a large group of people reduces religion to science and even
metaphysics and misses the sui generis (i.e., unique) and core elements
of religion. Such is the power of group-think that conflation of different,
albeit related, domains of human experience can remain hidden in a societal
blind-spot. Not even the film makes this blind-spot transparent.
The full essay is at "My Name Is Bernadette."
With the U.S. fed up and only
100 governments left willing to attend COP30 in Brazil on combatting carbon-emissions
and the related global warming, the question of whether the basis of the annual
conference, voluntary compliance, is sufficient and thus should be enabled by
the staged meetings. Even to continue to have the conferences annually can be
viewed as part of a broader state of denial, given that the 1.5C degree maximum
for the planet’s warming set at the Paris conference a decade earlier was
by 2025 universally acknowledged by scientists to no longer be realistic; the
target would almost certainly be surpassed. It is in this context that any progress
from COP30 should be placed.
The full essay is at "COP30."
On the very day in which a
health-care company’s executive collapsed in the Oval Office, with U.S.
President Trump being the only person in the group standing and looking away in
what looks like callous disregard instead of compassion or empathy, that
president directed his Administration to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that
the U.S. Government had to fund food-assistance, or SNAP (formerly “food stamps”)
completely for the month in spite of the "government shutdown." On the next day, the Trump Administration demanded
that the member-states that had just paid out full November benefits to SNAP recipients
“’undo’ full SNAP benefits paid out under judges’ orders” because the U.S.
Supreme Court “stayed those rulings.”[1]
The photo of Trump literally looking the other way while everyone else in the
Oval Office is bending over the collapsed man out of concern perfectly aligns
with his lack of concern for Americans going without food due to the sudden stoppage
of money for food without notice. That many employees of the U.S. Government who
had been laid off without pay since earlier that November would be especially
reliant on food-assistance money precisely because they were no longer obtaining
income (or else they were receiving unemployment compensation at less than full
pay) could be understood to be a matter of callousness rather than moral
sentiments from Trump simply by looking at the photo.
1. Scott Bauer and Nicholas Riccardi, “Trump
Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Full SNAP Payouts as States Warn of ‘Catastrophic
Impact,’” The Associated Press, November 9, 2025.
Even though it may be tempting
to summarize the virtues of ancient Rome as “might makes right” because of the
emphasis, which is even in the Latin language, on fighting armies and
repressing rebel populations, the virtues did not reduce to those of war. In
fact, such virtues, as Nietzsche suggests in his texts, can serve as a
refresher for our species as it has “progressed” through the centuries since
the Roman Empire existed. Even though the film Gladiator (2000) contains
much mortal combat albeit contained in coliseums rather than unrestrained on
battle fields, at least three clusters of virtues can be gleamed and
articulated as alternative “schools” of virtue ethics. This is not to say that
all three are equally valid, however. The virtues cherished by the Emperor
Commodus, for instance, are arguably inferior ethically to those of his father,
Marcus Aurelius, and even those of the gladiators.
The full essay is at "Gladiator."
The political debates
concerning the accession of candidate states such as Texas, California, Alaska
and even Hawaii into the U.S. were long past when the issue of enlargement became
salient for the E.U. due to Russia’s unilateral, unprovoked invasion of
Ukraine. In the American case, surely no one was arguing that the U.S. without being
enlarged would cease to be credible, yet in 2025, a government official of the
candidate state of Montenegro said as much of the European Union. Even if Filip
Ivanovic was merely using rhetoric during an interview on October 4, 2025, even
that should at least make sense. Making matters worse, his comments can be
interpreted as ultimatums for the E.U. even though nothing binds the E.U. to
annexing any future state. In fact, given the veto-power of state officials at
the federal level in the E.U., enlargement should arguably come only after
internal reform of the E.U.’s basic law concerning the power of the states at
the federal level.
The full essay is at "The E.U. without Enlargement."
The medium of film has an
amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue,
narrative, cinematography, and even sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved,
renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured
up even at a deep level in the psyche of a film-viewer. That emotion can be
fused with another, seemingly antipodal emotion, such as joy, and an
instrumental score can capture and stimulate both. Such is the case with the
film, Silent Night
(2021), which interestingly was made during the global coronavirus pandemic in
which even young people were suddenly confronted with the notion that they
could die rather than grow up. The film’s closing instrumental version of the
song, “Silent Night,” incredibly fuses joy with dread and even hints at distant
religion as sheer depth in feeling rather than anything supernatural. The
fusion of Christmas joy and the dread of suicide inexorably coming up is best epitomized
by the instrumental, hence more than by the plot, dialogue or visuals.
The full essay is at "Silent Night."
The Latin noun, machina, can be translated as “machine, engine, military machine, contrivance, trick, or artifice.” The Latin word, e, or ex, means “from” or “out of.” Hence, ex machina can mean out of a machine, which figuratively interpreted can refer to a certain function of a machine that does not seem possible for a mere machine to do. Artificial intelligence, which is simply machine-learning, in a computer can seem to be outside or apart from what a mere machine built by humans can do. Ex machina is actually part of the phrase deus ex machina, which originally referred to a god or goddess appearing above the stage in a Greek tragedy—the deity being pulled across the top by pulleys (i.e., machina). A sacred deity appears above the other actors by means of profane, mechanical pulleys that do not seem capable of presenting deities, so the latter seem to come out of rather than being of the former. AI, or artificial intelligence, may seem to be coming out of an android because the “human” body is made of materials, including pullies perhaps, that do not seem capable of learning and other human likenesses. In fact, machine learning, which is beyond the programming that is written by humans, might seem at least initially like a miracle, or even as godlike relative to the materials that make up a computer and android “body.” Deus ex machina. More realistically, such an android is likely to appear human rather than divine. David Hume claimed that the human brain inexorably hangs human attributes on divine simplicity (i.e., a pure notion of the divine as One); perhaps today he would point out that we do the same thing when we encounter AI. The danger of the all-too-alluring anthropomorphism of which the human brain is so capable can not only be in viewing an android with AI as human, but also in lauding the inventor/programmer of the AI android as a god for having “created” such a “living” entity that can think for itself and even appear to feel and act as we do. The movie, Ex Machina (2014) easily dispels both applications of deification. Furthermore, any anthropomorphic illusion that the androids are human and can be taken ethically as being so is also dismissed by the end of the film. Any apotheosis (i.e., rendering someone or something as divine) is so tenuous that the film’s main two human characters illustrate for us just how fallible we are in our understanding and perception of AI in an android-form. The danger is real that AI could get ahead of our emotions and reasoning such that we could leave ourselves vulnerable to being harmed by AI androids by projecting the human conscience into what is actually computer programmed coding.
The full essay is at "Ex Machina."
In ancient Greek tragedy, it
was not uncommon for a god or goddess to perform the function of a Greek (i.e.,
conscience) chorus at the end of a play while being pulled by pullies high
above the stage. Deus ex machina is the Latin phrase, which meant, a
deity out from pullies. We get machine, mechanism, and even engine from the Latin
word, machina. A movie entitled Ex Machina is on an AI android
that seems full of life, even miraculous, from “pullies” inside it’s “body.” Ex-Prince
Andrew of the (seceded) sovereign state of UK, or “Britain” informally, seemed to
fly about the other actors in being able to land, rent-free, fittingly
around Christmas, 2025, at the monarch’s Sandringham estate in eastern Britain,
still rent-free, and with King Charles funding his brother. Considering that Andrew
Windsor should arguably been sent to prison for having sex with a 17 year-old
prostitute in the employ of the infamous Epstein, and that a large settlement paid
by Queen Elizabeth II made Giuffre’s charges go away, as if magically, Andrew
not only landed on his feet, but without touching the ground where us mere
mortals make our way through life to survive and perhaps prosper.
The full essay is at "Accountability for the Rich and Famous."
Having recently been presented
with an E.U. citizen denying the E.U. has citizens even as he admitted that he
could vote for a candidate to represent him in the European Parliament, I had
my faith in human rationality restored the following day in reading of a poll
of E.U. citizens on whether additional states should be added to the Union;
ideology, even of the tribal sort, need not distort rationality beyond
recognition. Even in the reporting of such a poll, however, the Euroskeptic, or
states’ rights, ideology left its imprint. Even such an auxiliary presence is a
sign of the headwind that has been facing the E.U. since its founding.
The full essay is at "E.U. Citizens."
Considering the amount of
screentime devoted to raw violence, it may come as a surprise that The Crow (1994) is
actually about love. Not that the film is about an abusive romantic
relationship, for the respect that is necessary for love is instantly expunged as
soon as violence enters into the equation. The infliction of violence is a
manifestation of self-love in the sordid sense of self-idolatry, rather than of
love that is directed to other people. So, it may be difficult to fathom how violence
can serve love, and even be a manifestation of love, as The Crow illustrates.
The full essay is at "The Crow."
“We remain committed to the
principle that international borders must not be changed by force.”[1]
This statement was signed by E.U. leaders, as well as officials at the state
level, and even leaders of sovereign European states such as Britain and Norway
several days after U.S. president Trump had met with officials from Ukraine at
the White House on October 17, 2025. If only the Europeans had been so unified
in 1939; it is difficult to fathom how the world would be 14 years short of a
century later had World War II not taken place. Force as a de facto decider of
territory has been the default through human history.
The full essay is at "Paradigm-Shift in International Relations."
1. Euronews, “European Leaders Back Ukraine Ceasefire Proposal at Current Contact Line,” Euronews.com, 21 October 2025.
An important implication of
the saying, a fish rots from the head down, is that it is important that
corrupt heads be swiftly punished so underlings get the message that crime in
public office carries considerable risk. In the matter of Ukraine’s possible
accession (not merger!) into the E.U. as a new state, the old, deeply entrenched,
culture of corruption in the potential state has been of particular concern in
the E.U.’s executive branch, the European Commission. In both the E.U. and U.S.,
it’s worth asking whether some states are more corrupt than others. It is a
mistake to treat all states alike in terms of where to direct federal resources
and how much of a given state’s resources should be devoted to investigations
of state officials. At least in 2025, Illinois and France could be said to have
been “problem children” in this regard, and this doesn’t mean that Hawaii and
Sweden, for example, also had as sordid corrupt cultures.
The full essay is at "Corruption in France and Illinois."
Released in 1976, The Omen reflects the
pessimism in America in the wake of the OPEC gas shortage and President Nixon’s
Watergate cover-up, both of which having occurred within easy memory of the two
notable assassinations in 1968. Additionally, the drug culture had come out in
the open in the anti-Vietnam War hippie sub-culture, and the sexual revolution,
which arguably set the stage for the spread of AIDS beginning in the next decade,
was well underway, both of which undoubtedly gave evangelical, socially-conservative
Christians the sense that it would not be long until everything literally goes
to hell. The film provides prophesy-fulfillment of a birth-narrative (i.e.,
myth) and a supernatural personality known biblically as the anti-Christ, who
as an adult will set man against man until our species is zerstört. It is as if
matter (the Christ) and anti-matter (the anti-Christ) finally cancel each other
out at the end of time. Economically during the 1970s, inflation and
unemployment were giving at least some consumers and laborers the sense of being
in a jet trapped in a vertical, free-fall dive of stagflation that not even
fiscal and/or monetary policy could divert. The pessimistic mood was captured
in another way in another film, Earthquake
(1974), in which a natural disaster plays off the mood of utter futility throughout
the decade. It is no wonder that Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” resonated
so much as a presidential-campaign slogan in 1979 as Jimmy Carter was mired in
micro-management inside the White House. The optimism of a resurgence in political
energy overcame the decade’s sense of pessimism. That Damien, the anti-Christ
in The Omen, survives the attempt on his life by Robert Thorn, his adoptive father
resonates with that pessimism. Satan’s plan is still “game on” as the film
ends, and this ending fits the mood in America during the decade. With this historical
context contemporaneous with the film laid out, a very practical, manifestation
of evil subtly depicted in the film and yet easily recognized by customers
frustrated with corrupt and inept management of incompetent employees will be
described in the context of pessimism from utter frustration. Such frustration
survived the squalid decade of the 1970s at least decades into the next
century.
The full essay is at "The Omen."
In line with the films, The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001), Passengers (2008) centers
on the (hypothetical) question of whether the walking dead have to be convinced
that they are indeed dead rather than still living. In all of those films, and
even Ghost (1990),
the dead who stick around as ghosts rather than immediately pass on to another realm
have something to come to terms with, or work out. The astute viewer of these
films is apt to wonder whether in the story-worlds of the films, as well as in
real life, all that is going on is really just in the dying brain of the dead
person, which is the case in Jacob’s
Ladder (1990). We know that a dying brain secretes a hallucinatory hormone.
As for whether there is even an actual afterlife, such a question is still beyond
our reach, at least before death. I contend that Passengers hinges on
whether the entire movie takes place in Claire’s mind. The answer hinges on the
nature of the existence of the other characters who are dead. If they have
their own agendas rather than are around to help Claire come to terms with the
fact that she is actually dead—that she was on the plane that crashed with no
survivors—then the film posits the existence of ghosts in our world rather than
just in dying brains. The issue, in short, is existential and metaphysical.
The full essay is at "Passengers."
Carl Schultz’s film, The Seventh Sign (1988), centers on the theological motif of the Second Coming, the end of the world when God’s divine Son, Jesus, returns to judge the living and even the dead. In the movie, Jesus returns as the wrath of the Father, which has already judged humanity as having been too sinful to escape God’s wrath. David Bannon, who is the returned Jesus in the film, is there to break the seven seals of the signs leading up to the end of the world, and to witness the end of humanity. Abby Quinn, the pregnant wife of Russell Quinn, asks David (an interesting name-choice, given that Jesus is of the House of David in the Gospel narratives) whether the chain (of signs) can be broken. How this question plays out in the film’s denouement is interesting from a theological standpoint. Less explicit, but no less theologically interesting, is what role humans can and should have in implementing God’s law. The film both heroizes and castigates our species.
The full essay is at "The Seventh Sign."
The U.S. Constitution includes
an open invitation for the accession of Canada into the U.S. as a state. The
invitation was made before Canada spread across from the Atlantic to the Pacific
oceans. So, were Canadians to seek statehood in the American union of states
(i.e., the U.S.A.), they would have a good argument for Canada being split in
to a few states rather than just one. This is qualitatively different than a “merger”
between the two countries; the latter ideological conjecture is predicated on a
category mistake. Such a mistake would say, for example, that Singapore and
China are of the same genus politically even though the former is a city-state
and the latter is on the (early modern) empire-scale. Just because both
Singapore and China have foreign policies and are member-countries of the UN
does not mean that a city-state is to be treated more generally as if it were
the same as an empire. By “empire,” I am referring to China itself, rather than
any territories it might have beyond mainland China. The Qing emperor Kangzi
expanded mainland China to include some central Asian kingdoms, thus making
China an empire (of kingdom-level/scale subunits). Similarly, the U.S., as well
as the E.U., are empire-scale/level polities of (kingdom-level) polities,
whereas Canada does not have enough such polities to qualify as being on the
empire-scale, for an empire contains many kingdom-level polities.
The full essay is at "Statehood for Canada."
With utility and consequences valued
so much in Western society at least as of 2012, when the film, Flight, was released, the
story-world of the film may seem odd in that doing what’s right comes out on
top, even at the expense of knowingly losing benefits and incurring costs
personally. In other words, deciding on the basis of conscience even at the
expense of good consequences for oneself is possible even in a culture in which
“saving one’s skin” rather than doing what is right is the norm. By immersing
viewers in a story-world, a narrative with well-developed characters can
highlight a societal blind-spot, and thus potentially result in a better
society in which people make the effort to re-value their ethical values to the
extent that their dominant values support consequentialism above standing on
principle even though bad consequences for oneself can be anticipated. In the
film, 96 out of 102 of the people on board survive the plane crash even though
the metal bird had been in an uncontrolled vertical fall from 30,000 feet. How
could the captain not be seen as a hero? If all that matters are results, 96
out of 102 is not bad at all, and being able to get out of a dive even as the
tail stabilizer keeps pointing the plane downward is extraordinary.
The full essay is at "Flight."
As a former KGB agent, Russia’s
President Putin could probably write a book and teach a course on the art of
lying, or fabrication, as means of doing foreign policy, which manipulation
being the not so subtle subtext. The tactic can be reckoned as being expedient,
with the loss of value in reputational capital being assessed to be a cost
worth incurring. That Putin lied to U.S. President Trump in Alaska in 2025 on
the Russian’s intention to “put an end to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”
should have caught the American off guard, if the claim made by Kurt Volker, an
American envoy to Ukraine that Putin had indeed lied to Trump about being
willing to meet and negotiate with the Ukrainian president is true.[1]
The American president was, in short, naïve even in being willing to meet with
his Russian counterpart, especially without the president of the E.U. present
too, at least to serve as a reality-test regarding Putin’s real game, for Europe
had more to lose—more on the line—than did America from incursions from the
east. Political realism is the theory that best fits the Russian president.
The full essay is at "Russia's President Putin."
1. Sasha Vakulina and Shona Murray, “’Putin Lied to Trump and Made Him Look Weak,’ Former US Envoy to Ukraine Says,” Euronews.com, 6 October 2025.
In chapter 11 of the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna reveals his real form to Arjuna. The chapter seems like a departure from the surrounding chapters, which focus on bhukti (i.e., devotion to Krishna). For example, in chapter 9, Krishna gives Arjuna the following imperative: “Always think of Me and become my devotee.” Unlike seeing the deity as he really is, sincere devotion to that which is based beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion is possible without being given “divine eyes.” The metaphysically, ontologically real is an attention-getter in the text, but it is the devotion, or bhukti, that is more important from a practical standpoint. Even theologically, the experience of transcendence, of which the human brain is capable, can be said to be more important than “seeing” divinity as it really is because the latter, unlike the former, lies beyond our grasp. In fact, seeing Krishna as he really exists is not necessary, for in chapter 10, Krishna says, “Here are some ways you can recognize and think of Me in the things around you [in the world].” This is yet another reason why the devotion rather than seeing Krishna as he really is, ontologically, should be the attention-getter in the Gita.
The full essay is at "On Arjuna's Vision of Krishna."
The Christian “belief in the ‘rapture’ of believers at the time of Jesus’ return to Earth is rooted in a particular form of biblical interpretation that emerged in the 19th century. Known as dispensational pre-millennialism, it is especially popular among American evangelicals.”[1] This biblical interpretation is based on the following from one of Paul’s letters to a church:
“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”[2]
Presumably the “trump of God” in the King James version of the Bible is distinct from Trump as God, for that eventuality would raise a myriad of questions and difficulties, and at least two difficulties pertain to the verse and, moreover, to dispensational pre-millennialism as a Christian doctrine. That it was constructed only recently by Christian standards raises the question of why the idea did not dawn on Christians closer to Paul’s time. That Paul does not represent himself in his letters as having met Jesus prior to the Resurrection and Paul’s use of mythological/Revelations language, such as “with the voice of the archangel,” also provide support for not taking the passage literally. After his resurrection in the Gospels, Jesus does not have the voice of an archangel. With Paul’s passage viewed figuratively or symbolically, rather than empirically and literally, the underlying religious meaning would of course remain unperturbed: keeping the faith is of value and thus in holding on to one’s distinctly religious (and Christian) faith, this strength will be vindicated even if no signs of this emerge during a person’s life. In other words, faith in vindication is part of having a religious faith, which is not limited our experience. The Resurrection itself can be construed as vindication with a capital V, regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead empirically and thus as a historical event. In fact, a historical account or claim is extrinsic to religious narrative even though the sui generis genre can legitimately make selective use of, and even alter, historical reports to make theological points. The writers of the Gospels would have considered this perfectly legitimate, given that they were writing faith narratives and not history books. Making this distinction is vital, I submit, to obviating the risk that one’s theological interpretations lead to supporting unethical state-actors on the world stage, such as Israel, which as of 2025 was serially committing genocidal and perhaps even holocaust crimes against humanity in Gaza. In short, the theological belief that supporting Israel will result in the Second Coming happening sooner than otherwise can be understood to be an unethical stance based on a category mistake. American Evangelical Christians may have been unwittingly enabling another Hitler for the sake of the salvation of Christians, while the Vatican stood by merely making statements rather than acting to help the innocent Palestinians, whether with food and medicine, or in actually going to Gaza’s southern border (or joining the flotilla) to protest as Gandhi would have done.
The full essay is at "On the Ethics of Dispensational Pre-Millennialism."