We’re living in a time when the far right and the far left in almost every institution are using the eccentricities and evils of the other end to justify their own extremes. There seems to be an emergence of reactionary and protectionist thinking all over the world, which then serves as justification for people’s overreacting on the political left. This ping-pong game has been so common in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even within Christianity—which should know better by now—that Christianity, for many, has come to mean anti-intellectual, fanatically narrow-minded people. Christianity, for some, is neither faith nor reason—just reactive tribalism hiding behind the skirts of Mother Church. How sad it would be if the Great Tradition ever settled for so little.
