Spiritual experiences show patterns and consistency across cultures and contexts—near-death experiences, miraculous healings, encounters with divine beings—which suggests an underlying structure rather than random brain misfirings.

Democratic Party became too trusting of institutions, allowing institutional monoculture to prevent friction and criticism that might have prevented some of its destructive policies, which contributed to Trump's rise.

The Babylonian conquest of Israel in the Old Testament narrative represents God working through an empire to punish the wicked, which doesn't mean the conquered people should revere the conquering power, challenging simple Christian interpretations of Trump as God's instrument.

The conservative movement now faces a strategic challenge of generating stable expertise and institutional knowledge infrastructure within a party that is temperamentally anti-establishment and populist.

Douthat's mother had intense spiritual experiences in charismatic healing services within mainline Protestantism, but the denomination lacked institutional continuity with that experience, leading the family to seek Catholicism.

Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel argues for fundamental limits and problems with materialist frameworks and is very short, making it useful for understanding why intelligent non-religious people might incline toward mysterianism over materialism.

Belief in a merciful God does not require solving theodicy (the problem of evil) completely; the problem of evil is acknowledged and wrestled with in religious traditions but not definitively resolved, yet this ongoing struggle itself demonstrates the resources religions provide.

Elon Musk has not functioned as the kind of Silicon Valley figure who might provide institutional grounding or skeptical counterweight within the Trump administration.

A 'man of destiny' can be bad, and one can believe in historical forces working through a figure while also rooting for that figure's opponents, just as one might recognize Napoleon's historical significance while supporting Wellington.

Conservative populism argues it speaks for the weak and oppressed—the native-born working class burdened by free trade that sent jobs overseas and social disorder from mass migration—positioning globalization's beneficiaries as equivalent to the rich in Jesus's parables.

Religious conservatives face a choice between three potential threats to Christian civilization: progressive woke ideology, Trumpian pagan cruelty, or Silicon Valley transhumanism, and it is unclear which poses the greatest danger.

Religious experience should be understood as fundamentally different from mental illness despite both involving altered brain states, because religious experiences show characteristics of sanity, awareness, and transformation rather than pathology.

Embodied existence in the material world is necessary for God's purposes, so most of the time people should experience material reality rather than spiritual transcendence, but spiritual experiences reveal the inadequacy of materialism.

It is more probable than not that after death humans will meet God and be asked to account for their life, which is not necessarily comforting but provides more than mere mystery.

After by Bruce Grayson is a good overview of near-death experiences from the perspective of a practicing physician that helps understand why people take these stories seriously and why they might unsettle a materialist worldview.

Liberalism trades on inherited Christian ideas about morality, equality, and dignity while rejecting the metaphysical structure (God, salvation, purpose) that gives those ideas meaning, creating an unstable position from which to argue with believers.

If someone required a religion pure enough to never be corrupted and never compromise with power to believe in it, they would require the religion to be quickly exterminated, making belief impossible.

Disenchantment is not actually real—religious and mystical experiences persist in secular societies because they are a fundamental feature of human consciousness, not a product of pre-modern belief systems that modernity has overcome.

Ancient Physics and Modern Faith by Stephen Barr is the best survey of arguments in modern physics that relate to religious questions and reasonable ways people might think about these intersections.

There are multiple possible interpretations of Trump as a historical figure: as bringing about a new American golden age, as an agent of necessary change through chaos without being personally good, or as a punishment on everyone, all of which deserve serious consideration.