What Religious Left?

Michael Wear on why Democrats can’t afford to abandon religious voters—and why Christianity should resist becoming a tool of either party
By Miguel Petrosky

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Podcast

Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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So Bad It’s Dangerous?

By Brian Francis Slattery
What’s the worst book you’ve ever read? The question doesn’t come up very often, but for the past 25 years I’ve had what feels like a trump card: The Turner Diaries, a violent and violently antisemitic, racist, and dystopian novel from 1978 written by William Luther Pierce, a physicist and rocket scientist who later in life became a neoNazi. He founded and led the National Alliance, which “was the most dominant and dangerous hate group in America,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “for nearly thirty years.” At the time I read The Turner Diaries, circa 2000, I had…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.