Status Updates From Confissões de um conservado...

Thank God this extended blog post is getting better. Lovely critiques of blind allegiance to capitalist consumerism by our conservative evangelical communities, and criticism of equating a free market with God’s providence. Music to my ears.

So far this should have been a blog post. Published in 2010, it’s severely outdated and severely under-researched.

A “Dan” recommendation. He said he read it in a day. I am reading it very slowly, trying not to break my brain! I am enormously thankful for being born and raised in the USA, but feel kind of like a chump reading this book by someone from the “outside looking in.”

“I would suggest that all Christians should vote, at part of their civic duty, but they should also feel pain when they mark the relevant box, knowing the trade-offs they are having to make at they do so, and how their action belies the complexity of reality.”

“Those who live by the ethic of wealth creation may well find their world dying by the ethic of wealth creation.”
Again….timely.
Also, just generally love a historian’s look at modern politics. Zooming out and seeing today’s politics in the broader context of world history really tempers the experience of it for me - in the best way.
There’s nothing new under the sun. True, & so easy for me to forget.

Regarding American democratic capitalism: “We would do well to be aware that we must never assume the way things are done now represents the ideal end of some historical process that is simply getting better and better. That is a pagan idea that also involves a basic idolatry of ourselves and our mores.”
To read this call out today, 5/1/25, by a historian in a book written 15 years ago is a wild feeling…