Published April 19, 2022
For many Americans today, glued with horror as they are watching the sad news out of Ukraine—after a two-year-long roller-coaster ride of a global pandemic—it is hard to know how to respond. No wonder articles have proliferated offering trite advice for “how to cope with anxiety” in the face of such upheaval. After all, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 seemed at first like a crisis of almost unendurable proportions, a year so fraught and so zany that it could not possibly be repeated. Many were the memes and the tweets on New Years’ Eve 2020 celebrating the death of the old year and looking forward to some return to normal in 2021.
Instead, the new year rudely greeted us with the Capitol riot and another full year of pandemic tribulation and political turmoil. 2022 has already given us the first full-scale European war in nearly eight decades, provoking massive spikes in already-surging fuel and food prices and promising prolonged disruptions to already-reeling global trade. There is little reason to expect a return to “normal” soon.
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Brad Littlejohn (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) is the founder and president of the Davenant Institute. He also works as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and has taught for several institutions, including Moody Bible Institute–Spokane, Bethlehem College and Seminary, and Patrick Henry College. He is recognized as a leading scholar of the English theologian Richard Hooker and has published and lectured extensively in the fields of Reformation history, Christian ethics, and political theology. He lives in Landrum, S.C., with his wife, Rachel, and four children.
Photo by Luis Cortés on Unsplash
Brad Littlejohn, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping public leaders understand the intellectual and historical foundations of our current breakdown of public trust, social cohesion, and sound governance. His research investigates shifting understandings of the nature of freedom and authority, and how a more full-orbed conception of freedom, rooted in the Christian tradition, can inform policy that respects both the dignity of the individual and the urgency of the common good. He also serves as President of the Davenant Institute.
