President Von der Leyen’s State of the Union Address: Outsourcing the E.U.'s Strength

E.U. President Von der Leyen’s 2026 State of the Union address can be characterized as a bricolage of concerns “all over the map,” with proposed significant outsourcing of responsibilities to the international level. A notable opportunity cost that goes along with her approach is the political benefit that could have been gained by alternatively focusing on internal reforms to the E.U.’s governance structure and processes. Outsourcing internationally adds to this cost of a missed opportunity to sell internal reforms by making the E.U.’s federal level look weak. Even referring to the E.U. as a “bloc” and proposing an “associate membership” for Canada saps rather than strengthens the European Union.

The full essay is at "President Von der Leyen’s State of the Union Address."

Canada as an Associate Member of the E.U.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, one trend in the American retail sector involved the creation of a status that had not existed: customers as “members.” The jargon was essentially marketing because managers in corporate headquarters realized that customers would doubtlessly appreciate the more exclusive label of “member” because clubs have members. Would the American political elite pick up on the trick and refer to citizens as members of the U.S. even though such a label so applied would not make sense? Meanwhile, to differentiate the E.U. from the U.S., Europe’s political elite regularly referred to E.U. states as member-states even though the same label could be applied to U.S. states. States of both unions are represented at the federal level, and thus are indeed members, whereas to be a customer is not to be a member of a store. When Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, sought closer relations with the E.U. due to his trade-fight with the U.S. in 2026, he discussed with European leaders the possibility of Canada becoming an “associate member” of the E.U. even though no such status existed. The implication is that E.U. states, unlike U.S. states, are not really states, but rather are members. This implication exposes the underlying category mistake that denies that states pertain to federal systems whereas countries are members of international alliances and trade blocs.

The full essay is at "Canada as an Associate Member of the E.U."

The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

The full essay is at "The Omen (2006)."

The Children Act

I contend that religion and science are two distinct and unique domains, and thus qualitatively different. It follows that they have their own distinctive criteria, which are rightly hegemonic in their respective domain. In other words, the criteria of religion should not be extended onto the domain of natural science, especially if in doing so the native criteria of science are eclipsed or overridden. Likewise, the criteria of science should not be superimposed into the domain of religion, especially if at the expense of the sui generis criteria of religion. The film, The Children Act (2017), demonstrates the problems entailed in imposing religious criteria onto medical science. An interesting question from having seen the film is whether any such hypertrophy of one domain’s criteria onto another domain inevitably incurs a narrowing of perspective and a corresponding warping of judgment.

The full essay is at "The Children Act."

Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine

Writing on theology and ethics and their application to politics and economics in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr runs the risk of fusing the respective domains, which I maintain are qualitatively different, and thereby minimizing or losing outright what is unique to each domain. Besides occasioning category mistakes, such as in labeling divine love as ethical rather than as distinctly theological, overreaches from one domain onto another even at the expense of the other’s own criteria can occur from the underlying error. Besides being extant in Niebuhr’s text, the conflation of distinct domains and the related overreaches of their respective criteria has exacerbated the long-standing conflict between the Jews and Arabs in what was Palestine when Niebuhr was writing his book on Christian ethics in which he discusses the sheer intractability of the conflict.

The full essay is at "Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine."

A Temporary Alignment of Politics and Religion: The U.S. Senate Sanctions Russia after a Funeral

It is easy to point to instances in which elected government-officials stage political theater for effect, for in the domain of politics, perception has a political currency that can leave a real imprint almost as if the staged were actual rather than pretense. When the leader of one group takes over as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from a person of another partisan group, for example, it is customary for them for the mallet literally to be handed over. In the U.S. Senate, its president, who is also the Vice President of the U.S., may sit in the presider’s chair during a vote if a tie is expected; the Senate President can vote only to break a tie. A certain depth of political meaning can go along with the actual presider presiding. Sometimes, however, an arrangement can have a depth of meaning as well as carry actual political weight. The Senate’s vote on additional economic sanctions on Russia on July 28, 2026 is a case in point, for the synchronicity itself could have caused goose-bumps on exposed skin. Even so, even profound political meaning (and fulfilment) is a far shot from religious belief and experience. Distinguishing these is important in this case, for the day of the vote included a very relevant funeral at the National Cathedral that many senators no doubt attended, and could be expected to ponder their own mortality and what may lie beyond.

The full essay is at "A Temporary Alignment of Politics and Religion."

Religiosity among Young Republican Men: An Escape from Homosexuality to White Privilege?

Idealism may exist especially in young adults because they have not experienced decade upon decade of the intractability of a deeply flawed social, political, and economic world’s status quo, which typically permits only incremental change. Zealous optimism can be expressed in a variety of domains, including religion, social issues, and politics. For example, political group-affiliation can stimulate a more intense devotion to religion, and vice versa. Even a passion on social agendas can translate into increased religiosity, and the latter can overreach onto the former. It can be asked of such instances whether the religiosity is genuine, or merely transferred energetic enthusiasm from another domain. The upsurge in religiosity among young Republican men polled by Gallup in the mid-2020s may be more political than religious. Relative to the growing numbers of non-religious-affiliated people in the U.S. as well as the E.U., the uptick among young Republicans should be put into perspective.

The full essay is at "Religiousity among Young Republican Men."

Religion Overreaching: Euthanasia

The Nazi program of inflicting euthanasia on the severely mentally ill in the twentieth century can be distinguished from cases in which suffering people with incurable diseases desire to die voluntarily sooner rather than later. In cases in which such people are mentally ill, the question is more complex, especially if the cause of the suffering is mental. In 2026, the Roman Catholic Church castigated a court ruling allowing the euthanasia of a mentally-ill person whose suffering stemmed in part from severe bodily pain and an incurable diagnosis other than that of the mental illness. Ironically, the Church discounted the element of compassion in putting someone out of one’s misery that would only get worse, and instead focused on “the culture of death” even though Jesus is silent on that issue, as well as homosexuality and abortion, in the Gospels. This is a case, I contend, of religion overstepping onto another domains—ethics and medicine in particular—while shirking its native fauna.  

The full essay "Religion Overreaching." 

The Mephisto Waltz

In a retelling of the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, The Mephisto Waltz (1971) plays out with the deal paying off, as Duncan Ely is able to live on in the body of Myles Clarkson. It doesn’t hurt that Ely is a master pianist and Clarkson has long, spry fingers (and that he has a beautiful wife, Paula). Even so, both Paula and the Clarkson’s daughter stand in the way of Duncan being able to get back to his own wife, and the film ends with Paula making her own deal with the devil so she can live on even though Duncan (and his wife) have already set about her demise. Because Duncan’s “after-life” transition is successful and even Paula, who has been opposing Duncan’s possession of Myles, ends up turning to the devil, the lesson of the film, Faust (1926) is effectively debunked. Besides The Mephisto Waltz, that God does not smite every case of injustice in the world—the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in the 2020s being a vivid and blatant example—may even further instigate interest in Faustian deals with the devil, even though that entity is known to be deceiver and thus not to be trusted. The allure of selfish gain can be worthwhile nonetheless for some people. For Duncan Ely, being able to go on living and gain even more fame as a performing pianist is worth the gamble, and it pays off. The medium of film is an excellent means of presenting the religious level, which is distinct yet interacts with the ordinary world that anchors the film.

The full essay is at "The Mephisto Waltz."

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

Decades before dying while doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural. Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.

The full essay is at "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist."

Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge

A contemporary scholar of Chinese philosophy wrote, “myths often contain an element of historical truth, and what passes for historical truth often has mythical elements.”[1] By implication, not everything that seems to be historically valid in a religious story is, for it is fair-game in that genre to assuage and even invent “historical” events to make theological points. Lest it be thought that histories are written objectively, it should not be forgotten that historical accounts are written by human beings, and thus are subject to our limitations, including bias. Nevertheless, religious stories, or myth, and historical accounts are different genres of writing, and have very different purposes and criteria. To conflate the two genres, or, moreover, any other domain with that of religion, is to deny the uniqueness of religion (as well as that of other, even related domains). Religion and ethics, for instance, are two, admittedly very closely related, domains of human experience.

The full essay is at "Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge."

---

1. Bryan W. Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2011), p. 2.

Selfishness and Damnation on the Boston Subway

Imagine a crowded, standing-room-only subway car during rush hour in Boston, Massachusetts. Even though many riders are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his own seat. It would be difficult upon seeing such a blatant display of selfishness not make certain assumptions about the man’s values and character. I did, twice on Boston subway trains, as I stood looking at one young man, and then another on another train about a month later who was doing the same thing. Because many of the train operators in Boston ignore their training by slapping the brake lever backwards all at once rather than gradually just before abruptly stopping at a station-stop, standing can be perilous. Once I found myself running through half of a trolley car to re-establish my balance because the driver had applied the brakes too abruptly.  The inconsiderateness for the riders could easily be inferred, and from that, we could say that the reckless employees suffered from the vice of selfishness. The same can be said of the drivers’ supervisors, for whom the word accountability was not in the English dictionary. With so much selfishness delimiting intending benefits to others that are intended by one’s decisions and actions, moreover, a dysfunctional organization and even an enabling society can be inferred. Some Christian theologians have sought to relate the ethical vice of selfishness to the religious sin of self-love, which as Pierre Nicole made clear in the seventeenth century, is mutually exclusive with Christian love from compassion. Even amid such clear relationships, the ethical and religious or theological domains should not be fused as if the two domains were actually one. To view selfishness self-love as containing both ethical and theological implications and yet hold that the two domains are qualitatively different—each having its own unique aspects—is the goal.

The full essay is at "Selfishness and Damnation on the Boston Subway."

The Vatican Tapes

After The Omen (1976), which was released just two years after the sardonic U.S. President, Richard Nixon, had resigned in utter disgrace from the presidency amid much economic and political pessimism in the 1970s generally, moviemakers got busy on stories involving demon-possession. The 2015 film, The Vatican Tapes, begins as an apparent demon-possession case and thus seems not to stand out among other such films, but towards the end of the film, when the demon-possessed young woman suddenly breaches the bounds of the sort of supernatural feats of which demons are capable, the true significance of her case emerges with stunning clarity. For that which possesses and kills the young woman is none other than the Anti-Christ, and that figure is in a wholly different league than demons.

The full essay is at "The Vatican Tapes."

Proliferating Blocs: The E.U. and Mercosur

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."

The Physician

In the 11^th 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."

The Master

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."

My Name is Bernadette

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."

The Seventh Sign

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 Aryan Couple

The matter of group-identity is salient in the film, The Aryan Couple (2004), which actually centers around two couples: Joseph and Rachel Krauzenberg, and Hans and Ingrid Vassman. The Krauzenbergs contract with Himmler, the man whom in Nazi Germany was tasked with riding the Reich of its Jewish population, to exchange the Krauzenbergs’ asset-rich and sprawling conglomerate for safe passage of the entire Krauzenberg family out of Germany to Palestine instead of being sent to a concentration camp. Joseph and Rachel are Germans, and yet, quite artificially, they refer to Germans in the third person, and to themselves as Jews. It is precisely this error that I submit may have contributed historically to the ostracism of the Jews in Germany even before Hitler’s rise to power, hence contributing to setting the stage for a final, horrific solution. Film can thus be used to widen people’s thinking on historical and political events, and thus play a deeper role than merely to entertain.

The full essay is at "The Aryan Couple."

Passive Aggression on Campus: Redefining Hate-Speech

Besides using social pressure and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable, the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different, even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust (and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).

The full essay is at "Passive Aggression on Campus."