Today TGC carries my article on why workplaces provide our best opportunity to influence culture:

Right now, many Christian efforts to “engage culture” or “contextualize the gospel” are focused on things like influencing elections or making Hollywood movies. It is very important for us to promote justice and beauty, simply because God loves those things, but politics and art alone cannot produce broader cultural impact. By themselves, they are incomplete pieces of the cultural whole. Daily work is where most people experience their cultures in its wholeness.

Consider joining us at the 2016 Faith@Work Summit this October 27-29 in Dallas! It’s the largest gathering of leaders in the faith and work movement, and we’ve been working hard to put together a fruitful program of speakers, breakouts and networking opportunities. Early bird discount ends Sept. 1!

EdChoice has posted Part 2 of my series on how to design education systems for a pluralistic society. In this part, I focus on how we don’t have a theory of education for a pluralistic society, yet somehow we manage to educate anyway:

It is striking that our society has practiced exactly this kind of pluralistic education for a very long time even though we have few publicly discussed ideas about what pluralistic education is or how it works. This should make us humble about the importance of theory. We’ve all heard plenty of funny anecdotes where the joke is that some cockamamie scheme “works in theory.” A friend of mine reports that in college, he actually heard a classmate exclaim, with heartfelt sincerity: “Dammit, communism works in theory!”

Education in a free society doesn’t “work in theory,” because we don’t have a theory that explains it. Yet somehow – though the status quo is very imperfect – we manage to do it anyway:

The fact that education is taking place in a pluralistic society is revealing. We are not as divided as we think. Our differences do not go all the way down. Our sense of absolute difference from one another, our sense of being locked in perpetual religious and moral wars with one another, is why pluralistic education “doesn’t work in theory.” Yet it works, however imperfectly, in practice. We are not as different as we may think, and our schools prove it.

Tolerance and consensus tend to emerge in local community. Nationally, we are divided. On talk shows and Twitter, we are divided. But we are more able to find common ground in the midst of our differences if we are dealing with people whom we know and who live in the same environment we do.

The stresses and strains we experience as we work amidst our differences are not always bad signs. Often, they’re good ones:

It is very hard to live with difference, much harder than we want to believe—a fact brilliantly explored in the recent movie Zootopia. We often get into conflict with each other. Deficiencies of goodwill are exposed. But this is what the process of building tolerance and consensus involves. These frictions are not signs that the process is not happening; they are the process itself. Experiencing social conflict over our differences is not the first step toward killing each other over them; it is the alternative to doing so.

As always, your thoughts are very welcome!

Yesterday, TGC carried my article on how the life of Jonathan Edwards illustrates why economic justice should be a gospel imperative for pastors:

Today, even those who affirm the need for both gospel proclamation and concern for justice often view them as competing priorities. More attention to one must mean less attention to the other, right?

We would benefit from a fresh encounter with Edwards’s confidence that these two imperatives cannot be separated, and his courage in living out that connection in a costly way.

Come for the hellfire sermon, delivered on Christmas Day, about how the worm-ridden corpses of the rich are no better off than those of the poor; stay for the heroic fight to deliver on broken promises made to the native tribes of western Massachussetts!

Commenters have raised pointed questions about my use of the term “justice,” to which I have responded in the thread. I do wish, now that it has been pointed out, that I had thought to mention and condemn Edwards’ participation in slavery – an economic injustice of the highest order.

As always, your thoughts are appreciated!

Arguments that Evan McMullin’s independent campaign for president of the United States is pointless have only succeeded in making me feel better about the McMullinmentum I’m already feeling sweep the nation.

Even hostile commentators admit he could throw an otherwise Trump-winnable election to Clinton and even has a plausible path to send the election to the House of Representatives, which would have to choose between the three.

1. If Clinton wins becasue of McMullin, the lesson the GOP learns is that it can’t win without conservatives. This is very, very good for conservatives! (The fact that this has to be said is a sad commentary on the commentariat, who seem to think it’s bad to be blamed when your enemies lose.)
2. Yes, if the election goes to the House becasue McMullin took Utah, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the House will pick Trump. But before it does so, it will have the opportunity to extract big concessions from Trump – he will go back on all the ones he can, but he won’t be able to go back on them all, and the ones he does go back on he won’t be able to totally go back on. And that would be an important new constraint on America’s Mussolini, of which we need all we can get.

The biggest attraction of McMullinmentum, of course, is to have an honest alterantive to vote for. Every single vote for McMullin – every individual vote – increases the number of Americans who go on record in history as refusing the decline into barabrism. Every vote for McMullin decreases the high cost of civilizational renewal.

It’s going to get darker for a few more years. The question is whether we have enough vision to see what will bring the light back sooner.

Image HT

Two new articles on very big questions today – First Thoughts carries my response to David French’s declaration that social conservatives risk becoming “the cheapest date in American politics”:

I wish I could be as optimistic as French about the future of social conservatism. He thinks that the choice of whether to become a cheap date is still before us. I wonder whether it hasn’t already passed. That’s one of the lessons of the fairy tales: The moment you become aware that you’re making a moral choice with titanic consequences is the moment after you’ve made the choice and sealed your fate.

And the newly renmaed EdChoice carries Part 1 of my new series on how to design an accountability system for education in a free society where we do not agree about the highest questions in life:

Our freedom to disagree about transcendent things does not mean that public policy can escape the responsibility to ask what is good, true and beautiful. In fact, the very assertion that it is good to have the freedom to disagree about transcendent things is itself an assertion about what is good, i.e. about transcendent things.

Any education policy embodies, and to a degree imposes, some moral view—even if it is only the view that the freedom to disagree is good. Indeed, it is in education where our public policy must have the strongest moral commitment to freedom and diversity if we want to sustain a society characterized by freedom and diversity.

The challenge of pluralism is also an opportunity for us to discover a fresh vision of human potential that embraces the freedom to disagree about the highest things.

As always, your thoughts on these matters are much appreciated!