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."

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."

Sarah Mullally as the Archbishop of Canterbury

On January 28, 2026, Sarah Mullally became the first woman to occupy the seat of the archbishop of Canterbury, which is the spiritual leader of the Church of England under its governor, the British King (or Queen) and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which includes the Episcopal Church. The King (or Queen) being above the archbishop in the Church of England is in line with Thomas Hobbes’ seventeenth-century theory that the sovereign should be in charge of church and state lest civil war break out (again). Just as a British king is a man and a queen is a woman, so too, as of 2026, the Archbishop of Canterbury could be a man or a woman. This of course set the Anglicans even further off from the Roman Catholic Church, where only men can be priests and bishops, including that of Rome (i.e., the Pope). I contend that the intransigence on this point is due to a logical error involving a category mistake just for added fun.

The full essay is at "Sarah Mullally as the Archbishop of Canterbury."

Political religion: Hitler Youth

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

The full essay is at "Political Religion."

Pope Francis: Religious and Secular Arguments for Governments Subordinating Markets to Social Norms

The documentary, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) chiefly lays out the pope’s critique of economic Man. The film begins with references to climate change too loosely linked to the global population figure of 8 million humans, 1 billion of whom are unnecessarily living in poverty. The viewer is left to fill in the gaps, such as that because as biological organisms we must consume and use energy, the hyperextended overpopulation of the species is the root cause of climate- and ecosystem-changing CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. Arguably, the salvific Son of God or the means into the Kingdom of God enjoy pride of place in the gospels, but compassion for the poor as well as outcasts and the sick is indeed a message that Jesus stresses in the faith narratives. Rather than being a sign of sin, poverty, especially if voluntary,  can permit the sort of humility that is much superior to the pride of the Pharisees. In the documentary, Jorge Bergoglio, who took the name Francis in becoming pope of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, is a practical man who points to the sickness or temptation of greed that keeps humanity from riding itself of poverty, unnecessarily. Moreover, the hegemony of the market, with its culture of consumerism and commoditization, comes at the cost of the common good, which to Francis has a spiritual basis. Abstractly speaking, harmony, which inherently respects its own limitations, should have priority over greed and markets. Both of these can go to excess without enough built-in constraints as occurred before and during the financial crisis of 2008, with poverty plaguing humanity more rather than less as a result.

The full essay is at "Pope Francis."

Religious Themes Secularized Through Film

One approach to infusing religion in a film is to utilize a secular lens to keep overt religious content hidden such that only its messages that can be stated in a secular way come through. The basic values of a religion can be transmitted without specific religious belief-claims possibly turning off some viewers. Given the mass audience that a typical film can reach, the medium is a good means for presenting people with values that come out of religion but have their own intrinsic worth apart from the related religious belief-claims. Film can play a role, therefore, in enabling the values of a religion to survive the religion’s downfall. From watching the film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), a viewer would not know that Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister. His wife says at one point in the film that Fred reads scripture and prays daily, but that is the only clue in the film that his religious faith is the source of his motivation for and messages on his show, “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.”

The full essay is at "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood."

Boy Erased

The film, Boy Erased (2018), is a drama that deals in a serious  way with the question of whether homosexuality is a choice, and thus whether conversion therapy is effective or an ideological ruse under the subterfuge of psychology and religion. Directed and adapted to the screen by Joel Edgerton, he could have dived deeper in writing the screenplay by making explicit the contending assumptions and ideas. Surprisingly, nowhere in the film do any of the biblically-oriented religionists quote the applicable verses in the Old Testament or in Paul's letters, or engage in a theological debate. The film could have gone further intellectually than the relatively superficial emphasis on the dramatic narrative.

The full essay is at "Boy Erased."

The Seminarian

A closeted gay student at an evangelical seminary is a contrast with a rather obvious clashing point, with the predicted ending being that the student is kicked out and must find or come into his own identity free of exterior constraints. Yet The Seminarian (2010) smartly avoids that road well-traveled. Instead, the screenwriter risks giving theology a prominent, and perhaps even central place in the film. The venture is at odds with the bottom-feeder mentality of Hollywood represented in the film, De-Lovely (2004), in which Cole Porter’s bisexuality occupies center-stage. Comparing these two films, irony drips off the screen as De-Lovely, which is patterned after a theatrical musical, looks down on Hollywood and yet has a common theme, while The Seminarian is a film through and through and yet takes the high road by supposing that the viewers can and will stay through some substantive theology, which transcends social issues and even the dramatic.

The full essay is at "The Seminarian."

Uncovering the Root of Poverty: An Addictive Habit

Addictive pain-killers killed 64,000 residents in the U.S. in 2016, in part because physicians tended to rely on patients’ self-determined ratings of pain on a scale of 1 to 10.[1] Such subjective ratings were of course vulnerable to self-seeking motives willfully negligent or even reckless in terms of health. A habit or marked tendency in favor of choices at the expense of a person’s own long-term well-being stems, I submit, from weak impulse-control. This, plus the related lack of consideration for other people, either causes or is associated generally with poor people at least in the United States.

Poverty, it has been said, is the cruelest form of war, for such war can go on and on and wreck subtle though tremendous damage on the afflicted. Yet the mentality that can get a person into such a war and associated bad choices can be easily overlooked by elites that deign to study the problem of poverty.

The full essay is at "An Addictive Habit."

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[1] Gregory Korte, “U.S. Waging Tech War against Opioid Epidemic,” USA Today, November 24-26, 2017.