Reflection for February 5

Our public discussion is overpoliticized and undermoralized. We don’t have conversations of the sort that Reinhold Niebuhr or Billy Graham or Abraham Joshua Heschel were leading—at least not in the secular conversation—and therefore we use politics as a sort of symbol for what are actually moral disagreements and moral panics. As a result, our politics turns into a war of all against all, and we can’t face the underlying moral issues (David Brooks, in an interview with Christian Century, “Chasing beauty, finding grace,” February 1, 2017).