Earlier this month I received good news from my employer: I was awarded a sabbatical for the Fall 2022 semester. This means I will not be teaching any classes that semester, nor will I be expected to serve on any university committee. It will be, in other words, a semester of rest from my university commitments.
Around the time I received word of this sabbatical, I also worked with my publisher to extend the deadline for Uneasy Citizenship to the end of 2022 instead of 2021. There were several reasons for this. First, I wanted to be able to include observations from the first couple years of the Biden administration to complement my observations of the Trump and Obama years, making the book simultaneously more timely and less trapped in one era of American politics
Second, the extended deadline will mean a book release in late 2023 or early 2024, around the time that the U.S. presidential campaign is taking off. From a marketing perspective, this means the book will likely get more traction than if it were released in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections or early in 2023.
And third, with the aforementioned sabbatical, I will have almost nothing to work on from May to December except for this book. I am already looking forward to taking a writing retreat or two during this time.
I’m excited to share excerpts of the book in the months ahead (similar to what I did here). Until then, I have these chapters planned:
Chapter 1: The Tension
Chapter 2: How Did We Get Here?
Chapter 3: The Polarization Problem
Chapter 4: The Culture Shift
Chapter 5: A Better Engagement
Chapter 6: Embracing Pluralism
Chapter 7: Strengthening Institutions
Chapter 8: Comfort in the Uncomfortable
Lastly, I have missed putting together regular editions of The Overview, but this has been necessary at a time when I need to be keeping my head down and focusing on teaching (and, unfortunately, grading), administrative work, and, yes, research. I hope to resume these newsletters over our university’s winter break.
However, this morning I came across perhaps the best essay I’ve read all year. It’s by Jake Meador from Mere Orthodoxy, and it perfectly encapsulates the years-long debate among Christians and others about the future of liberalism1 in the United States. I’ve mentioned this debate before (indeed, it will play a prominent role in a chapter of Uneasy Citizenship), and Meador summarizes it very well:
There is a certain sort of story about American life that white Christian conservatives like to tell themselves. In this story, America is a spiritual battleground, a war zone in which forces of unbelief, secularism, and revolution are constantly striving after supremacy with Christian conservatives serving as the chief obstacle to their triumph.
This battlefield metaphor, with Christians standing as the last best hope for America, is at the heart of any discussion of the future of liberalism. But while some thinkers, like Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Rod Dreher, argue that the way forward is to advance “the common good” via state power lest we become martyred exiles to an increasingly illiberal Left regime, Meader argues that Christians should be taking a much wider view:
We should not naively romanticize what this will mean, to be clear. Nor should we positively desire exile as a good in itself. Exile will almost certainly mean the closing of churches, shuttering of colleges and universities, and a persistent hostility to the Gospel that will take many years to overcome, if it is overcome at all. All of this in turn means many people being lost, barring God reaching them through some other miraculous means — which he can, of course, do. No, we should not desire exile.
But we should be open to exile if the only other choice set before us is to betray the sober calling of Christian discipleship and the yoke of Christ put on us that calls us toward love of God and love of neighbor. If the cost of contending for our neighbors, all our neighbors, is exile then so be it. We might be pariahs for a season in the halls of American power, but given what those halls do and promote, is that such a loss? If a man gain the whole world and lose his own soul, what does it profit him? If the cost of fidelity to our Lord is exile, even martyrdom, then that is not a cost too high for the reward set before us.
Amen.
Not the liberalism of the Democratic Party, but rather the classical liberalism of people like John Locke, with a focus on individual rights, consent of the governed, and the like.
Lots to think about in this tweet, starting with "how does Dr. Bennett afford a 5 acre yard on a JBU professor's salary?"
Also, "The faster that book gets done, the better."