
As an indicator of national frustrations, the headscarf crystallizes the collective hysteria of a declining power that clings to its dreams and its extinct splendor.

This essay is part of a book forum on Immaculate Misconceptions by Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones.

Everywhere, adults laugh at children for their giddy games, whereas they are blind to the ways in which their pretend play shapes every aspect of their lives and leads to exploitation and injustice. Human experience, particularly the experience of the youngster – where the ground of the soul and the ground of God come together in an overflow of light, constitutes the basis for the radical immanence of God within the world.

Eventually, we all need others, leaving cooperation, humility, and patience the only lasting realities of human access to power. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that power can abandon any of us, at any moment – even and especially on a debate stage, in full view of the entire planet. We all forget this lesson at our peril.

“Ideology asserts that something other than Jesus Christ awakens one from the world’s stupor, but no other force is adequate to the task.”






