Changing Lanes: An Execution to Be Televised Prompts a Papal Statement

Although Pope Francis amended Catholic social ethics to exclude the death penalty rather than continue to accept the punishment in cases in which no other punishment is practical or available, Pope Leo decided in October, 2026 to make a public statement of his Church’s opposition to the death penalty in reaction to the decision of the Trump administration to televise an upcoming execution live on television. That a woman had recently survived execution attempts by two lethal injections may have primed the pope’s pump, as it were. The danger is that the foray into applied ethics by leaders of a religious organization could conflate ethics and theology. That the latter transcends, and may even violate ethical principles, can easily be forgotten when a religious leader speaks out a lot on ethical issues. In the case of Pope Leo’s statement on capital punishment, a distinctly theological rationale can be found, and, I submit, should have received more emphasis, lest the religious leader be reduced to an ethical critic, or conscience. To be sure, in 2026, the world was very much in need of a public conscience, especially because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was still underway, as was Israel’s genocide in Gaza and wanton violence in the West Bank—all of this aggression was being done with obvious impunity.

Tennessee, a member of the U.S., attempted to execute Debra Johnson with two doses of pentobarbital on September 30, 2026. “At one point she was on a ventilator and her attorney did not expect her to survive. However, they said Pike woke up and began walking with assistance.”[1] This quoted passage from the media makes her recovery seem like a miracle. If it was, perhaps the distinctly Christian deity, which is selfless love (agape), saved Pike’s life out of opposition to the death penalty. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord comes from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the deity is epitomized by compassion especially for one’s detractors and even enemies. Pray for those who persecute you, and respond to their human needs with acts of compassion. Neither prayer alone nor being compassion friends suffices. Forgiveness is implicit in being compassionate to someone like Pike, who in 1995 had beaten and stabbed one of her classmates. It is not as if she had gone a murder spree, mowing down many people with gunfire. If the botched execution could be considered to be cruel and unusual punishment, mercy in the form of a reprieve would be justified. After all, she had already spent 30 years in prison knowing that she would be executed—inflicting that expectation for three decades could also be considered as cruel.

On October 8, 2026, the U.S. announced “that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.”[2] Hasan was an army psychiatrist when he “open fire with a handgun at a medical facility at Fort Hood on 5 November 2009 as soldiers waited for medical checks before deployment. He was shot by a police officer during his arrest and left partly paralyzed, and now uses a wheelchair.”[3] It would be interesting to determine whether he was resisting arrest when he was shot. If he was not, then the police employee should have been arrested and charged with attempted murder. As for Hasan, the United Nations’ office of the high commissioner for human rights warned after the Pentagon’s announcement of the public execution that broadcasting it would “breach the absolute prohibition of torture.”[4] Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, characterized the televising of the disabled man’s execution as a “barbaric idea.”[5] Unlike Pike, Hasan murdered many people. Also unlike Pike, Hasan himself was shot and partially paralyzed, perhaps unjustly. Even so, airing the execution for the world to see could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. This question is political and jurisprudential, as well as ethical in nature; it is not in itself a religious question unless explicit reference to Hasan’s redemption is added.

In writing Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the point that Abraham is both guilty of attempted murder and is faithful to the divine command to sacrifice his son. The negative jurisprudential and ethical claim is consistent with the positive attribution of faithfulness to the Yahweh—both are correct because they refer to different domains. The charge of attempted murder is valid legally and ethically, and the praise of Abraham obeying a divine command even to sacrifice Isaac is valid theologically. The validity of the theological claim is not invalidated by the unethical act of attempted murder. Theology transcends ethics. Were the Ten Commandments in Torah prior to Abraham, then attempted murder would have theological currency and the question would be: Does the commandment not to kill supersede the divine command to Abraham to murder Isaac? Moreover, how are we to navigate between two conflicting divine commands?

Not being Abraham, and with the Ten Commandments in scripture, both Tennessee and the U.S. faced both the ethical quandary of capital punishment and the divine, theological, decree not to kill. In responding to the debate on whether the U.S. should televise Hasan’s execution, Pope Leo reiterated on October 10, 2026, the World Day Against the Death Penalty, that capital punishment is “inadmissible.”[6] The American Midwestern pope claimed that the punishment is contrary to the inherent dignity of a human being. Human dignity is an ethical rather than a theological term, and thus is not useful from a distinctly theological standpoint. In other words, were the pope driving a car on a road, it could be said that he swerved into another lane; even though the two lanes are related, they not the same lane. Unfortunately, the pope did not use the car’s turning signal to indicate to other drivers that he was going from one lane to another. This analogy falls short, however, because the pope did not entirely leave his lane.

Although the pope wandered from his theological education in claiming in his written statement, “Effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens,” he stayed within his ken, and thus in the theological or religious domain, in adding that capital punishment deprives “those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”[7] This raises the question of whether a murderer on death row who has sought redemption could then, on religious grounds, be executed. The pope could have added that in the Ten Commandments, the commandment against killing other human beings prohibits capital punishment—that a murder carried out by a criminal does not justify yet another killing, even by a government. Two wrongs do not make a right is an ethical rather than a distinctly theological saying, and thus should not be used in a religious rationale against capital punishment. Rather than appealing to the dignity of a human being, the pope should have stuck with the theme of redemption and added the commandment against killing human beings. Rather than venture into the field of criminal justice as if he had been educated in that field of knowledge, he should have elaborated on redemption itself. It is admittedly very tempting to go beyond one’s ken to pontificate in other domains of knowledge and human experience. I will not hold this against the Pope, as he too is a native Midwesterner from northern Illinois (even though he serially sins by favoring the White Sox over the Chicago Cubs—or is his lapse merely unethical?).

In conclusion, unless an unethical act (or intent) is proscribed by a divine command or decree, or interferes with soteriology or another distinctly theological value, ethical analysis should be left to ethicists. Put another way, studying theology does not also earn a student the right to a diploma in ethics, which is a subfield of philosophy. To be sure, the two fields can be related, but this is not to say that knowledge in one constitutes knowledge in the other. Unlike theology, criminal justice and the ethics of conduct do not contain the element of religious transcendence, which, as Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, inherently extends beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotions). Contrarily, to say that science still has unknowns is not to say that the empirical unknown lies inherently beyond our reach. Religious functionaries and leaders, to the extent that they are oriented existentially to the inherently beyond, and thus to interpreting other human domains of experience  in terms of the theological, radiate holiness by driving without swerving into other lanes in order to have more influence.

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1, “Christa Pike Is Discharged from a Hospital after Surviving Execution Attempt, Her Attorney Says,” APNews.com, October 10, 2026.
2, David Smith and Ariana Baio, “’Medieval’ and ‘Disturbing’: US Plan to Livestream Execution Elicits Global Condemnation,” The Guardian,  October 2026.
3. Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5, Ibid.
6, Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo Condemns Death Penalty, Vance Vows Not to Watch Hasan’s Execution Live,” Euronews.com, 10 October, 2026.
7. Ibid.

St. Francis of Assisi: On War and Greed

St. Francis of Assisi died 800 years before October 4, 2026, assuming that the days dropped in adopting the Gregorian calendar after his death have been incorporated in the calculation. It seems that not only gravity affects time; changing calendars does too. As time passes, how past heroes are viewed changes according to contemporary circumstances and values. Painting of Jesus during the late Roman Empire depict him as a young Roman, with short hair and clean-shaven. During the Middle Ages, when beards and long hair were in style for men, Jesus too was depicted in such terms as we recognize in modernity. Similarly, I contend that Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza and violence in the West Bank framed the 800^th death-anniversary of Francis in terms of peace and diplomacy being salient in his mission. I contend that this emphasis unduly relegates something more important to him: his strident stance against greed, and even money itself as a symbol of avarice.

In a piece on the anniversary, Euronews reports on Francis having worked on behalf of diplomacy and peace to the extent that his explicit stance on greed and wealth (the two being tightly linked) is hardly mentioned.[1] This omission must be obvious to theologians. In 2026, the E.U. state of Italy made October 4^th a state holiday in honor of the saint “to celebrate the universal values of peace, fraternity, solidarity, and respect for the environment embodied by Saint Francis of Assisi.”[2] No mention is made of Francis as a young man disavowing his family’s wealth because he believed that having accumulated money and being greedy are tightly linked. Other than Clement of Alexandria, the linkage was assumed by major Christian theologians in the patristic period—and this only began to change with Aquinas allowing for moderate profit (differing from Aristotle in making this move). Aquinas living amid Commercial Revolution has a lot to do with his novel stance).[3]

Euronews quotes Paolo Nicelli, an expert on the relationship between Islam and modernity, who points to Francis crossing enemy lines in one of the Fifth Crusade to engage in diplomacy with the Egyptian sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. That Francis as “a model of peace and interreligious dialogue” would be highlighted by Euronews in 2026 was not lost on Nicelli, who said in 2026 of Francis’s “example of mercy and forgiveness,” as in his crossing enemy lines in amity “is even more necessary today, especially in a globalized society like ours.”[4]  By globalized, people in 2026 would doubtlessly think of the awareness the world over of Russia’s invasion and Israel’s genocide. That context played a role in which of Francis’s stances was emphasized.

To be sure, reaching out to, and even compassionate acts for, enemies and even a person’s detractors and rude people can be said to be the way into the kingdom of God depicted in the Gospels. In fact, crossing enemy lines can be construed as the true meaning of the symbol of the Cross, and the kingdom of God here and now as the proper focus of Christianity itself.

Even so, the story of Francis commanding a friar to retrieve a coin by mouth and place the coin on a pile of animal dung to drive home the valuelessness of earthly wealth and its tight association with the sin of avarice is entirely absent from the Euronews reporting on Francis’s upcoming feast day. The closest that the reporters come is in quoting Nicelli as claiming that Francis, as a diplomatic model “runs exactly against the prevailing values of today: careerism, individualism, selfishness, self-centeredness, and self-glorification and so on.”[5] Careerism and selfishness are both closely related to greediness because greedy people tend to be very motivated to “climb the corporate ladder” in order to earn higher salaries and to be selfish due to their lack of concern for economic benefits going to other people unless there is something financially in it for the selfish person oneself. For example, a greedy person has no problem demanding an exorbitant rent, much above what a residence is actually worth, even knowing that the prospective tenant will struggle to pay so much. “That’s not my problem,” such a lessor would think regarding such a lessee. The privileging of money for oneself is reflected in an indifference toward whether other people benefit financially. Hence, selfishness and greed are good friends, while greedy people make awful friends.

In explicitly tying having a sack of coins to greed, and therefore selfishness (and the related sin of self-love), St Francis has been remembered as an extremely anti-wealth friar. Highlighting his anti-war stance pales in comparison, yet in the context of military invasion and genocide, the recessive role can easily become the dominant characteristic. To be sure, financial interest often is not irrelevant to waging war. It is no accident, for example, that the U.S. Government purchased bombs from American companies (in what President Eisenhauer coined as the military industrial complex) while being allied with Israel as it was conducting a genocide. Also, as Nicelli observes in regard to the dispute between Christians and Muslims in Francis’s day over Damietta, the fact that the city was “a major commercial hub . . . so the dispute is not spiritual but clearly of an economic and military nature” supports the contention that greed is more fundamental than war, which is not to say that greed is behind all warfare.[6] What is remembered from the past has perhaps as much to do with a contemporary context than with the actual history. History may say more about us than itself. Perhaps by recalling Francis’s strong anti-wealth position—that having accumulated earnings is itself indicative of being greedy—the subterranean financial interests behind contemporary military aggression can be rendered more transparent.

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1. Fanuel Morelli and Celilla Ghezzi, “Assisi Marks 800 Years Since St Francis’s Death and Remains a Symbol of Peace and Dialogue,” Euronews.com, 2 October 2026. See also my chapter on voluntary poverty in God’s Gold as well as the related chapter in Godliness and Greed. The latter text is an academic treatise.
2. Ibid.
3. See my texts in note 1 above. Francis would not doubt point out to you that in citing my own texts, a financial motive probably lurks under the surface. That assumes that people would rush out en masse to buy my books, which is as likely as hell freezing over.
4. Fanuel Morelli and Celilla Ghezzi, “Assisi Marks 800 Years Since St Francis’s Death and Remains a Symbol of Peace and Dialogue,” Euronews.com, 2 October 2026.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, italics on “economic” being added.

Higher Education: Far from Christianized

How might universities that are affiliated with a Christian organization, or “Church,” apply the values enunciated and illustrated in the gospels in ways that distinguish such schools as specifically Christian? Do academic administrators at colleges and universities that are formally affiliated with Christianity apply the preachments by Jesus in the New Testament, let alone ask the question? At most, the question, when asked, is usually answered in terms of increasing financial aid, but in the gospels Jesus is not oriented to programs, but instead to interpersonal relations, specially as bear on the marginalized or outsiders in general—the proverbial last being first and most people who regard themselves as first, as last. How might faculty members who delimit their application of academic colleagues to scholar who are on the same faculty, hence at the same college or university? An unlikely example of a Christian values being applied by a professor at Yale, a university whose privileging of exclusivity and thus exclusion is well ensconced (and known) can be contrasted with the organizational culture at the Roman Catholic Church’s official university in the United States. Any cleric administrators at the Vatican who regard the Protestant denominations, or sects, as instances of compromised Christianity might want to take note of the contrast between the Catholic University of America and Yale.

The full essay is at "Higher Education."

The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

The full essay is at "The Omen (2006)."

Angels & Demons

Although a sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006) and also directed by Ron Howard and written in part by Dan Brown, Angels & Demons (2009) stands on its own as a narrative and thus as a film in its own right. Although the relationship between science and religion undergirds the film’s dramatic tension, the more fundamental leitmotif running throughout the film is the sheer ambiguity involved in whether a given character is more like an angel or a demon. An implication is that we mere mortals should not presume to judge the religiosity of other mortals; that’s God’s job, for we so lack the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

The full essay is at "Angels & Demons."

Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine: On the Impact of Categorical Overreaches

Writing on theology and ethics and their application to politics and economics in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr runs the risk of fusing the respective domains, which I maintain are qualitatively different, and thereby minimizing or losing outright what is unique to each domain. Besides occasioning category mistakes, such as in labeling divine love as ethical rather than as distinctly theological, overreaches from one domain onto another even at the expense of the other’s own criteria can occur from the underlying error. Besides being extant in Niebuhr’s text, the conflation of distinct domains and the related overreaches of their respective criteria has exacerbated the long-standing conflict between the Jews and Arabs in what was Palestine when Niebuhr was writing his book on Christian ethics in which he discusses the sheer intractability of the conflict.

In Niebuhr’s view, “the full evil of human finitude and sin is most vividly revealed in conflicts between national communities.”[1] Such conflicts “present a tragic revelation of the impossibility of the law of love because no party to the conflict has a perspective high enough to judge the merits of the opponent’s position.”[2] That is to say, every perspective is partial, and thus partisan, rather than wholistic containing tensions and even outright contradictions. “Every appeal to moral standards thus degenerates into a moral justification of the self against the enemy.”[3] To Niebuhr, “self-love is never justified.”[4] This is so both ethically and in religious terms. On the ethical level, Niebuhr insists that, “In spite of the relativity of morals every conceivable moral code and every philosophy of morals enjoins concern for the life and welfare of the other and seeks to restrain the unqualified assertion of the interests of the self against the other.”[5] Any moral justification on behalf of one’s own side against one’s enemy cannot be construed as moral, but, rather, immoral qua egoist. In terms of religion, Niebuhr wrote that “human egoism . . . is sin only from the perspective of the law of love.”[6] Here, Niebuhr’s statement would be more congruent on the religious level if self-love, which is a sin, were substituted for egoism, which is an ethical term. Self-love is a sin because it goes against charity, meaning love in a distinctive religious sense (i.e., caritas). The seventeenth-century Jansenist priest in Europe, Pierre Nicole, penned an essay railing against self-love precisely because it is antithetical to charity understood as love (rather than as philanthropy); even enlightened self-interest is still of sordid self-love and thus not at all consisting of love.

In Niebuhr’s discussion of international conflicts between nations in which distinctly religious love, such as manifests in compassion rather than hatred to enemies, is wholly absent, and taking into account the squalid theological idolatry of self-love that places love of self above love directed to an externally-based divine (e.g., God), Niebuhr’s theological claim, “Parties to a dispute inevitably make themselves judges over it and thus fall into the sin of pretending to be God,” is hardly surprising.[7] The gravitas of self-love that renders any combative perspective partisanship (i.e., partial) is ultimately sourced in self-idolatry, hence presumptuous infallibility and the presumed universalizability of one’s perspective as absolute can be expected. In the mid-2020s, in the midst of Israel’s militaristic decimation of Gaza, which went far beyond the damage that had been committed by Hamas in an attack in Israel in 2023, Niebuhr’s distinctly theological claim readily applies, and may even explain the longstanding intransigence of the aggressor in the multi-year operation that went far beyond justice to vengeance, which, incidentally, is supposed to belong to Yahweh alone.[8]

Writing in the mid-1930s, hence prior to the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Niebuhr perceived the “rivalry between Jews and Arabs in Palestine” as “a conflict between two races and religions, involving not only the natural will-to-live of two collective racial organisms, but [also] the economic differences between the feudalism of the Arabs and the technical civilization which the Jews [were] able to introduce into Palestine.”[9] From a standpoint in time after many decades from the establishment of Israel, it is easy in hindsight to grasp the superiority of the technical civilization not only economically, but also militarily. Even in the 1930s, the conflict must have been generally perceived as frozen in terse intractability. The rule of love based on forgiveness, as in being compassionate to enemies, was so far from the contending mentalities and emotions in Palestine that Niebuhr’s more general claim that such love is impossible in the world of politics appears to be tenable (even though I disagree with his claim).

So, in utter futility, Niebuhr asks his readers rhetorically, “How can a high enough rational and moral perspective be found to arbitrate the issue between” the Jews and Arabs in Palestine? “How is the ancient and hereditary title of the Jew to Palestine to be measured against the right of the Arab’s present possession? Or how is one to judge the relative merits of modern Jewish against ancient Moslem culture without introducing criteria which are involved in and do not transcend the struggle?”[10] Both peoples had some historical presence in the region, and the involvement of religion and questions of ethics in this mess renders the conflict that Niebuhr perceived in the 1930s as even more intractable. Conflating all of these domains doesn’t help.

For example, the claim that the Jews had a hereditary title is dubious if it comes out of a religious story, or myth, and has been superimposed on the political domain, for the religious and political domains are arguably distinct—each having its own unique basis—so criteria from one of the domains supervening on those of the other can be flagged as an overreaching encroachment and thus as out of bounds, to evoke sports. Put another way, the jurisdiction of material in the mythic genre does not extend into the political world, whose genre is that of political power rather than faith narratives. So, it would be more accurate to say politically and culturally that both the Jew and the Arab had (conflicting) historical interests in occupying the land.

Replacing the theological dimension with that of ethics and basing that on history, even fusing these two domains, is also problematic. Niebuhr disparages that the “(p)articipants cannot find a common ground of rational morality from which to arbitrate the issues because the moral judgments which each bring to them are formed by the very historical forces which are in conflict. Such conflicts are therefore sub- and supra-moral.”[11] In other words, ethical analysis would get only so far, rather than resulting in a definitive should that both parties would accept as legitimate as taking into account their respective interests and histories.

At this point, Niebuhr shifts back from the ethical to the religious level of analysis, but even in spiritual terms, he was not optimistic. “The effort to bring such a conflict under the dominion of a spiritual unity may be partly successful,” he admits, but then he observes that such efforts had “always [produced] a tragic by-product of the spiritual accentuation of natural conflict.”[12] Even though religion “may be regarded as the last and final effort of the human spirit to escape relativity and gain a vantage-point in the eternal,” the “introduction of religious motives into these conflicts [has usually been] no more than the final and most demonic pretension.”[13] In other words, the presence of religious motives on both sides contributed to the sheer intransigence of the antipodal political positions.

Again, warding off distinctly religious content from the turf of actual geopolitics between nations in the context of international relations is advisable, but distinguishing related domains is easier said than done, given the proclivity of the human mind to agglomerate different strands as if they were essentially the same stuff. This tendency is especially egregious when at least one of the domains, along with its criteria, is unique and thus not just different from the others. Given the tendency to project or apply religious meaning onto geopolitics, it is worth taking into account Niebuhr’s suggestion that “a contrite recognition of the finiteness and relativity which characterizes human spirituality, even in its moments of yearning for the transcendent,” is necessary in applying religion to political/cultural conflicts between nations lest the “religious aspiration” be “transmuted into sinful dishonesty” and thus make the political matters even worse.[14] In other words, without spiritual humility in line with the true situs of finite creatures, which of course are not deities and thus are not omniscient or omnipotent, religious beliefs can easily become weapons even in the midst of stultifying cognitive dissidence.

Hence Niebuhr laments, “Historical religions, which crown the structure of historic cultures, thus become the most brutal weapons in the conflict between cultures.”[15] This happens too much, and at least part of the problem, I submit, is that religious meaning is so often conflated with differing genres or domains, including those of history, politics, and even ethics. A religious entitlement to land, a title whose jurisdiction is limited to the religious domain, is not itself a political statement. Put another way, the criteria in the domain of religion that undergird the religious claim of being chosen by a deity, or even a shared deity, for the land, or even a chosen people, do not override the criteria of political power that are sovereign in and innate to the political domain; in fact, the criteria innate to religion do not even have validity there.

I contend that religious meaning, as in what religious scholars classify as myth (i.e., a religious story with a message), is qualitatively different, as well as unique, from the contents that are “home grown” in other, even related, domains. International disputes stand a better chance of being mitigated and even solved if all the combatants would “get on the same page” in the sense of focusing on the distinctly political criteria of international relations, whether the criteria are based on international law or the nature of power itself in the state of nature as described by Thomas Hobbes in his classic text, Leviathan. Diverging interpretations of a passage in a distinctly religious text need not complicate matters that could perhaps be solved politically, especially if those interpretations are subject to the gravitas of self-love and thus partial. At the very least, the contention that a convenient interpretation of one’s own text has universal validity incurs a conflict of interest even just in religious terms. For example, the statement, my sacred book says I get to win, inherently lacks credibility, and incurs the “extra-jurisdictional” overreaching of religious content onto the political domain of winning territory.

Category mistakes, consolidation, and especially presumptuous overreaches of one domain’s criteria into another domain even at the expense of that other domain’s own, sovereign criteria have been committed so much that they may be taken for granted, as valid, even as we look back at the Catholic Church’s overreaching onto Galileo’s valid scientific criteria and scoff at the theological overreach. The world is at the center of Genesis in that religious text, but this does not mandate or justify presuming that the religious meaning is astronomical in nature and applying theological criteria onto those belonging to astronomy. From the other direction, foisting criteria of the domain of history onto a faith narrative also counts as an overreach—in this case, at the expense of the sui generis (literally “of its own genus”) religious domain and its own criteria. From such errors, even peaceful international relations can be thwarted.

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1. Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1936), p. 136.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 64.
5. Ibid., p. 116.
6. Ibid., p. 124.
7. Ibid., p. 136.

8. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” gave rise to Nietzsche’s point that because the vice conflicts with the divine attribute of God’s goodness (omnibenevolence), the interlarding of the former invalidated the concept of the deity, hence Nietzsche wrote, Gott ist tot (God is dead), even as Nietzsche leaves the living deity itself untouched. Misinterpretations of Nietzsche’s famous line presume, in effect, that the actual divinity can be changed by human hands, and thus discredited and even killed. It is a problematic, internally inconsistent conception of the deity that is the object of Nietzsche’s critique. In the movie, Angels & Demons, a priest asks Prof. Langdon whether he believes in God, “not what men say about God.” This distinction reflects Augustine’s point that due to the Fall, divine revelation reaches us as through a smoke-chalked rather than transparent window.

9. Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, pp. 136-37.
10. Ibid., p. 137.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., pp. 137-38.

A Temporary Alignment of Politics and Religion: The U.S. Senate Sanctions Russia after a Funeral

It is easy to point to instances in which elected government-officials stage political theater for effect, for in the domain of politics, perception has a political currency that can leave a real imprint almost as if the staged were actual rather than pretense. When the leader of one group takes over as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from a person of another partisan group, for example, it is customary for them for the mallet literally to be handed over. In the U.S. Senate, its president, who is also the Vice President of the U.S., may sit in the presider’s chair during a vote if a tie is expected; the Senate President can vote only to break a tie. A certain depth of political meaning can go along with the actual presider presiding. Sometimes, however, an arrangement can have a depth of meaning as well as carry actual political weight. The Senate’s vote on additional economic sanctions on Russia on July 28, 2026 is a case in point, for the synchronicity itself could have caused goose-bumps on exposed skin. Even so, even profound political meaning (and fulfilment) is a far shot from religious belief and experience. Distinguishing these is important in this case, for the day of the vote included a very relevant funeral at the National Cathedral that many senators no doubt attended, and could be expected to ponder their own mortality and what may lie beyond.

The full essay is at "A Temporary Alignment of Politics and Religion."