Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
We the Fallen People 6 Original sin is not a popular notion. You sure won’t find Oprah supporting it. The idea that we are born with a tendency to do wrong, to be selfish, to ignore the common good is just downright unAmerican. As McKenzie notes in We the Fallen People, “A New York Times …
We the Fallen People 5
Should religion and politics mix? Many today decry the involvement of “evangelicals” while others hail their impact. Religion has always had an influence. But are there better ways and worse ways to do it? In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his classic Democracy in America that the clergy wielded extraordinary and positive influence …
We the Fallen People 4
What has made democracy in America work despite its drawbacks? One weakness Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his classic Democracy in America sounds all too familiar today. In the 1830s he saw that the most noble and qualified people were seldom elected. Instead those who won office often bowed to the lower impulses of the …
We the Fallen People 3
You’ve seen the surveys. Most people think they are more friendly, more intelligent, more honest than average—an obvious impossibility. We have a hard time seeing ourselves objectively. We are just too close, and too likely to accentuate our virtues and minimize our weaknesses. It’s true of groups (sometimes called ethnocentrism) as well as individuals. How …
We the Fallen People 2
Many think something is very wrong with the U.S. political system. In Robert Tracy McKenzie’s excellent book We the Fallen People, he contends that one problem lies with how we have wandered from the way the Framers of the Constitution understood human nature. As we saw in my last post, the Framers were realists who …
(We the Fallen People 1)
Complaining about political gridlock is our new national pastime. Congress seems to get barely anything done. What would the Founding Fathers of the United States think about all this? They’d be delighted. Why? Because it would mean that the Constitution was working as intended—making change difficult and slow. How did they achieve this? By spreading …
Ten years ago today one of the great Christians of our age passed away. Here is what I posted on that day. John Stott passed away today at the age of ninety. And it is as if a giant oak of the Christian landscape has fallen. As he has faded from public view in the …
Poet Steve Turner wrote, “History repeats itself. Has to. No-one listens.” The tragedy is that smart people continually think they are exceptions to the rules. Ironically, people who don’t think they are too smart are better off because they believe they can benefit from the experience of others. In Jared Diamond’s recent book, Upheaval, the …
They say, America’s polarized in unprecedented ways. Is that true? Consider the election held in 1800 too. Just twelve years after ratifying the Constitution, President John Adams ran for re-election against his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. The rhetoric was superheated by hyperpartisan media, making it one of the country’s most acrimonious episodes. Jon Meacham’s …
Over my forty years at InterVarsity Press I crossed paths with J. I. Packer a number of times. This soft-spoken and steady British theologian, who died this past week, became something of an accidental celebrity when his substantive book Knowing God suddenly became a best seller. When, as a newly minted InterVarsity campus staff member …