Public Life Is Crazy, but Americans Aren’t
Lance Morrow The Wall Street Journal
The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, after closing for a while, plans a comeback next year—without elephants or lions or other animals. The circus was cruel to the creatures, it was decided, so in the future they will be absent from the big top.
No matter. If it’s beasts of the jungle you want—the savageries of nature, red in tooth and claw—politics and media offer an ongoing and spectacular show replete with raging ideology, riots, race hate, store looting, police-car burning, pageant plays, Proud Boys, deadly pandemics, mass shootings, cops caught on video doing dastardly things, the Capitol assaulted by mobs. Politics and media are co-producers of the immense 21st-century moral circus. It offers Americans such grand and enraging constitutional spectacles as Roe and Dobbs, such extravaganzas as the Transgender Follies and White Supremacy vs. Black Lives Matter. Held over (though not necessarily by popular demand): The Orange Man and the Dotard.
In the meantime, Americans struggle with their private lives and sort out their private thoughts. Sometimes, it is true, they are inflamed by the tremendous agitations of the circus. How could they not be? But the private mind is still committed to the sanity and realism that are necessities of survival. What Americans worry about is inflation. Reality is an insistent thing. Grown-ups know that they are being imposed on by the big show. They understand that a circus is a circus. The sane American mind—mens sana in corpore morbido—is the best hope now, I suspect.
EPPC is seeking a full-time Director of Communications to oversee all external communications via earned and owned media channels. This role requires strategic expertise to ensure that all communications efforts align with EPPC’s mission and advance our priorities, as well as the tactical skills to execute this work on a day-to-day basis. It also requires the ability to synthesize the variety of work produced by our many scholars and programs into a cohesive story that reinforces EPPC’s identity as an institution.
EPPC Fellow Noelle Mering joined Buck Johnson on the Counterflow podcast to discuss woke progressivism and her book Awake Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressivism.
EPPC Policy Analyst Clare Morell joined John Rush on the Rush to Reason podcast to discuss how transgender activists take advantage of social media platforms to reach kids and circumvent parents.
Listen on Soundcloud. Clare’s segment begins at 25:08.
NEW PODCASTS
On the tenth episode of the Life After Dobbs podcast ( Apple Podcasts | Spotify | EPPC Site ) Ryan and Alexandra host EPPC Fellow Carl R. Trueman to examine the anthropological and philosophical questions underlying the abortion debate. In his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl explains the history of the ideas which led to this rhetorical chasm and shows the connection between long-dead thinkers and contemporary politics. The Christian worldview, characterized by dependence and relationship, is sharply contrasted to that of the modern Left and its preference for autonomy and self-expression.
Molly Ball and Russell Moore: Evangelicals and America's Abortion Wars
This edition of the Faith Angle Podcast ( Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Faith Angle Site ) features one of the country’s most thoughtful, publicly-minded evangelical leaders, Dr. Russell Moore, who is now a year into directing the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today. He is joined by Molly Ball, TIME Magazine’s national political correspondent. Moore and Ball discuss abortion and the evangelicalism along with a group of 19 journalists who gathered three days after the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
