Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war.
In our age of digital connection and constantly online life, you might say that two political regimes are evolving, one Chinese and one Western, which offer two kinds of relationships between the privacy of ordinary citizens and the newfound power of central authorities to track, to supervise, to expose and to surveil.
Most people want the convenience of the Internet far more than they want the private spaces that older forms of communication protected.
The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality.
I am not a post-liberal and I do not think that such a return to full 19th-century anticlericalism inevitable or even likely - which is one reason among many that I doubt the bargain many religious conservatives have made with Donald Trump.
There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door.
Great preschools are no easier to build than great high schools, and if you think your kids might be better off in the care of a parent or with some extended family member, then a system designed around a dual-income plus day care norm will likewise feel like a burden, or a trap.
If we had a populist president who didn't alienate so many persuadable voters, who took full advantage of a strong economy, and who had the political cunning displayed by Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban, the liberal belief in a hidden left-of-center mandate might be exposed as a fond delusion.
A diverse elite may be good in its own right, as a matter of justice and representation. But nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy's ruthless solipsism.
Donald Trump could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our government's ineffectiveness and gridlock.
There may be left-wing or liberal solutions to our deeper problems. But an elite that tries to manage them away with more enlightened media curation deserves to inherit nothing but the wind.
Trump could also only win the presidency without a popular-vote majority because a large region of the country, the greater Rust Belt and Appalachia, had been neglected by both parties' policies over the preceding decades, leading to a slow-building social crisis that the national press only really noticed because of Trump's political success.
In Barack Obama's second term, with his legislative agenda dead in a Republican-controlled Congress, the president turned to executive unilateralism on an innovative scale.
It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized.
It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity - ethnic, cultural, religious - in many political arrangements.
I grew up in a household that spent most of my childhood on a religious pilgrimage through American Christianity.
I had just been sort of raised and formed in a general Christian context, and it seemed to my teenage self that I found the argument for Catholicism very compelling. To the extent that there was a personal driving force, it was more on the intellectual side of things than the mystical or deeply personal. When I converted, I thought it was true.
I get the sense people sort of imagine that in my personal religious life I must be an intense rigorist wearing a hair shirt under my clothes while scourging myself. And, really, I'm not a rigorist by temperament.
I didn't really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn't present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority.
I don't think of 'heretic' as a pejorative term - necessarily.
