Evan Sandsmark

Nothing grates against the ear quite like one's own voice, but here is 20 minutes of it on a podcast I helped put together for the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab at UVA. It's an exploration of an ancient political fear, the "tyranny of the majority," but told through the story of an Iraqi refugee seeking asylum in Austria. It is a good story because of the courage of its protagonist and the skill of the Lab's producers.

Click here to listen to the full episode.

Over the last several weeks, I've been putting together an annotated bibliography on religion and liberalism for the Religion and Its Publics project at UVA. The bibliography attempts to get clear on exactly what liberalism means while also exploring what critics find objectionable about it. Ultimately, I offer a "bibliography with an agenda," as I put it in the introduction, because I defend a "chastened" or "thin" liberalism as the best political arrangement we can hope for under conditions of pluralism. I am disinclined to view liberalism as good in itself because those living in liberal societies may be forced to make grave moral compromises, but it is nevertheless the best system we can hope for since it prevents even worse moral calamities, like violations of conscience that call the worthwhileness of life into question (e.g., forced conversion). Here is the bibliography's table of contents:

(1) Liberalism Defined   (1a) The History of Libera…

A short article on Trump and moral culpability for The Square, the Religion and Its Publics blog.

http://relpubs.as.virginia.edu/trump-and-the-banality-of-evil-by-evan-sandsmark/

It's my intention to have some thoughts soon.