Articles

It's not so much the story you believe as the lie that I tell myself about you now that we can’t, or won’t, speak of anything else but history’s latest, loudest fool. We have forgotten how to praise the beauty of the earth, or to gripe about Kansas’ City’s offensive line; things indifferent. Things there’s…

In July 2021, Tim Muehlhoff and Rick Langer had a lengthy conversation with Theon Hill, a communications scholar whose research delves into the interface between the Black community and white evangelicalism, writing on the relationship between rhetoric and social change—particularly as related to race, culture, and American politics. He has written on the topic of…

© 2016, Used by permission of the artist. Black Lives Matter! Defund the Police! We often get immersed in the issue and forget the human aspect. These photos were created in response to the murders of African men, due to police violence. The mothers in Henry’s series of photos have not lost their sons but…

American civil discourse is in decay. It is commonplace that many citizens not only disagree but do so disagreeably. However, disagreeableness need not be a feature of our discourse. After diagnosing several instances of decayed discourse as failures of intellectual virtue, the article offers suggestions for fostering virtues—such as humility, open-mindedness, and fair-mindedness—that can help…

© 2017, Used by permission of the artist. “Water is a human right!” read signs held by angry residents in Flint MichiganJake May, “More Than Fifty People Protest Flint’s Water Quality in Downtown March,” MLive, February 14, 2015, https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2015/02/flint_residents_protest_citys.html. —a majority-Black city where 40 percent of people live in poverty—complaining of unsafe drinking water. In…

Studies in moral and political psychology increasingly shed light on both the positive and negative political consequences of moral conviction. While people’s convictions engender courage to stand up for their beliefs despite the cost, they also trigger more negative emotions, polarized attitudes, and hostile responses. At a time when our political climate appears increasingly divided…

Your petitions—though they continue to bear just the one signature—have been duly recorded. Your anxieties—despite their constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value—nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind. Your repentance—all but obscured beneath a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment—is sufficient. Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering,…