Donald Trump

So what’s been the most shocking thing to come out of GOP-presidential-nomination-land in the last couple days?

I had work to do the other day, but I set it aside to reread Elie Wiesel’s Night as a way to mark the great man’s death and remember his life.

While I was struck by passages I anticipated, like his account of how his belief was shattered upon seeing the furnaces of Auschwitz—“Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever”—it was an unexpected line that caught me, given a current news story I’d been following.

Trump complains that tax-exempt rules require religious nonprofits to be silent on politics. He’s wrong.

We are living in a time of nativism around the globe. Britain just voted to leave the European Union based on Euroscepticism. The Alternative for Germany movement aims to do the same for the EU’s largest remaining nation, while France’s National Front Party and Italy’s Northern League have grown in power over the last decade. And in the U.S., the Republican Party has nominated a candidate whose platform includes building a giant wall on the border.

In an effort to triumph over the religious right, many progressive Christians have married their faith and politics to the Democratic Party, leaving little to no gap between their political visions and the party’s policies. Instead of celebrating this as a successful strategy for re-ascendency, I see it compromising radical Christian commitments to peace and justice.

Plato, it is said, confronted Diogenes as the great Cynic philosopher washed his greens for dinner. “If you had humored Dionysius”—the tyrant of Syracuse who had called Plato as an adviser—”you wouldn’t be rinsing greens now.”

Diogenes answered him, “And if you rinsed greens, you wouldn’t have been a slave to Dionysius.”

Populism is a predictable recurring feature of any society that is unwilling or unable to be as democratic as it claims to be.

A narcissistic demagogue is different from a racist-völkisch one. But Trump's ideological unpredictability bears its own dangers.

As this campaign season reels recklessly, leaving a wake of increasing intolerance, those holding differing opinions can find little common ground. Past seasons of “come, let us reason together” have disappeared; unreasoned assertions from the chronically ignorant now dominate the increasingly purchased airwaves. Little from any side appears balanced or fair. We craft dollar-driven hegemonies of self-satisfied ignorance, cultures of the titillated and thoughtless. Where we once enshrined the ideals of freedom, we now erect a golden calf of contempt atop a tower of babble. Call it the gospel according to the uninformed.

When creed gives way to screed, who speaks into our opinionated age with a staid voice of wisdom?

"Narcissists can be inspiring. Whether they are creative or destructive depends on their philosophy."

Both Cruz and Trump say the U.S. needs special surveillance of Muslims. This is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw from terrorism in Europe.

Trump does well among those who identify as evangelical—but lack deep formation in faith. Formation fixes people’s eyes on higher things.

Matt talks to the Union Theological Seminary president about the church and Trump, "unending" sermon endings, and her book Trauma and Grace.

This week, the National Review published a statement to Catholics opposing Donald Trump’s campaign for president. Authored by right-wing eminences George Weigel and Robert George, and cosigned by an impressive list of Catholic intellectuals and leaders, the document joins a body of anti-Trump literature that is coming into its own stentorian rhetorical conventions.

Something subtle and remarkable has happened in American politics—and, it seems, in democracies across the developed world. The big arguments over what the state owes the people, in terms of services and public welfare, have been somewhat eclipsed. Now the focus is on who counts as people in the first place.

Any attempt to counter Donald Trump's appeal needs to address the fundamental economic realities behind that appeal.

Donald Trump’s proposal to screen all Muslims in the U.S. has drawn considerable backlash from liberals and conservatives alike. Journalists, bloggers, politicians, and religious leaders have condemned Trump’s plan and argued that it is inconsistent with core American values such as equality and religious freedom. They argue, rightly, that Trump’s comments are definitive proof that he shouldn’t be president. Really, he shouldn’t be anywhere near the presidency. He shouldn’t even be allowed to watch The West Wing.

This criticism is justified and necessary, but it is unlikely to be heard by those most drawn to Trump’s rhetoric.

So far, this presidential campaign season has been dominated by the narrative of the steadfast outsider. A July poll found that more than three-quarters of Donald Trump’s supporters like him because he stands up to the media and isn’t interested in political correctness. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, a secular Jew and registered Independent, is energizing the Democratic base—not by minimizing his European-style socialism, but by shooting straight. “He’s so authentic, he’s hip,” wrote Steve Winkler in the Guardian. 

Then there’s Joe Biden, who hasn’t said yet if he’ll run.