Charles Mathewes is the Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author of A Theology of Public Life and The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times, among other books.
Ambivalence captures the internal nature of liberalism’s discontents.
Augustine is crucial to determining the continuity and dissimilarity between the Romans and ourselves.
“White Christian nationalism” remains a grievance-driven mode of whiteness.
Even as he was sharpening and deepening his critique of capitalism’s effects on democracy, Habermas never jettisoned his faith in the idea of democracy itself.
Our societies are not secularizing so much as pluralizing, becoming sites that host multiple and quite radically different ways of being human in our common world, many of them religious.