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James Diddams
Welcome to the Diddams blog, home of all my writing on Politics, Theology, Economics, Art and Philosophy.
My Writing
- The Real Problem at Wheaton College – First Things. November 30, 2022. An essay which is at once an apologia for and a critique against my alma mater, the institution I owe above all others, Wheaton College.
- On the “Medieval Question” – Providence Magazine. October 18, 2022. An essay on historiography and the role of the Medieval in our collective moral and political imagination.
- Economists as the High Priests of Liberalism – Providence Magazine. An essay on social science. December 14th, 2022.
- A Weighty Education – The American Conservative. January 15, 2022. An essay on moral formation.
- Cities of Men and Architecture of God: A Review of Philip Bess’ Till We Have Built Jerusalem – Providence Magazine. November 10, 2021.
- Either Meritocracy or the Common Good, Not Both: A Review of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit – Providence Magazine. July 23, 2021
- Red and Blue Christian Disunity: A Review of Yancey and Quosigk’s One Faith No Longer – Providence Magazine. September 13, 2021.
- Emergency Executive Powers: Not Needed Indefinitely – Mercatus Center. April 17, 2020 White paper coauthored with Christos Makridis and Weifeng Zhong.
- Who’s Afraid of Integralists? – Juicy Ecumenism. April 14, 2021
- Review of Daniel K. Williams’ “The Politics of the Cross” – Juicy Ecumenism. June 10, 2021
- Is Integralism a Serious Answer to Liberal Progressivism? – Juicy Ecumenism. May 5, 2021. My summary of the University of Dallas 2021 Liberalism vs. Integralism conference.
- Review of The Gospel Coalition‘s Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church – Juicy Ecumenism. July 27, 2021
ABOUT
Hello! My name is James Diddams and I am the Managing editor of Providence Magazine, a publication of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a think tank based in Washington, DC. I’m an aspiring writer/academic with a broad inter-disciplinary area of interest at the intersection of philosophy, theology and social science. I’m also an Anglican (ACNA) Christian.
I was born and raised in Seattle and graduated from Wheaton College (IL) in May, 2020 with majors in Philosophy, Art History and Economics as well as minors in Math and Political Science. Then, in the Fall I was a Fellow with the John Jay Institute, where my full-time job for a semester was living in a mansion with 7 other 20-somethings and reading great books of the Western canon. Then, in January, 2021 I moved to Washington, DC where I interned with the Heritage Foundation and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, eventually working full-time at IRD in the Summer. I worked at IRD until the end of January, 2022 before leaving to be the Academic Programs Officer at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, DE into May and then moved to Madison, WI to work at the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, a think housed within the Political Science department at UW-Madison in July. Then, in December 2022 I moved back to Washington, DC to start as an editor at Providence.
I consider myself at the beginning of a great journey of learning across all of the disciplines I’m interested in. I have plans for spending a significant amount of my life in graduate school in the future, but for now am mostly focused on building a portfolio of writing.
Citations
According to a Mercatus Center paper published last year by Weifeng Zhong, Christos Makridis and James Diddams, “The eight presidents since 1976 have declared a total of 64 national emergencies under the National Emergencies Act, 35 of which are still in effect to this day and most of which outlasted their motivating emergencies.” The oldest of the 35, “Blocking Iranian Government Property,” was declared in 1979. I was 14 years old.
But let me end with a piece of a recent Juicy Ecumenism essay — “America’s Birth Dearth” — about a related topic. Wheaton College graduate James Diddams, who focuses on political theology, points to the work of University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox.
- Liberal Arts, Piety, and the Past: Responding to James Diddams’ First Things Piece – Anxious Bench. December 13th, 2022. Joey Cochran, professor of History at Wheaton College, responds to my First Things essay on the real problem at Wheaton College. December 13th, 2022.
Provocatively entitled hit pieces, putting Wheaton College under public scrutiny, have become a novel bromide in the era of evangelical fragmentation… James Diddams’s piece is [different] because it hails from an institutional insider, a recent graduate. Reproofs like this warrant more than callous dismissal. They ought to be heeded.
JamesDiddams.org 