Theology

What we now call “woke” culture is best understood not as a radical break with American history but as its logical, secular continuation. It is a new Protestant Reformation, but with a crucial, defining absence: God. The theological architecture remains intact, but the foundation has been removed, leaving a superstructure of intense moral fervor, anxiety,…

Puritans, Pioneers, and Dating Apps… Émile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, wrote at the turn of the twentieth century about a profound transformation in Western social life. He observed that as traditional communities — the extended family, the church, the village, the guild — lost their hold on individuals, the individual was increasingly left alone…

The United States is simultaneously one of the most religious and most theologically illiterate societies in the developed world. Americans profess belief in God at rates far higher than their European counterparts, yet surveys consistently show that large numbers of self-identified Christians cannot articulate basic doctrinal differences between their own tradition and others. Catholics attend…

The theological revolution that stripped away Catholic consolation did not remain confined to the church. It migrated into the very structure of American culture, shaping how Americans work, rest, judge one another, understand suffering, and experience their own inner lives. The “tyranny” of Protestantism — the isolation of the individual before an inscrutable standard, the…

Based on the Loss of Consolation The passage highlights a profound difference in how the two traditions understood the relationship between God and the suffering believer. Medieval Catholicism, for all its institutional flaws, had developed an elaborate system of consolation — a network of mediations that softened the terrifying distance between fallen humanity and an…

The Problem of American Theological Empathy The question posed—whether the Puritan tradition, so quick to condemn the poor for lack of spiritual receptivity, was itself a perpetrator of profound empathy failure toward Black Americans—opens a philosophical wound in the American moral consciousness. This is not merely a historical curiosity but an ongoing structural reality that…