Why We Are Restless
Ben and Jenna Storey met while doing their doctorates at the University of Chicago. Ben is the Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs, and Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University. Jenna is Assistant Professor of...
The Sphere, 20 Years Later
It was love at first sight. Tall and statuesque, she cast a beautiful golden glow. To a 23-year-old Florida girl, she radiated the style and energy of my new city, and I wanted to be just like her. I sat...
100 Days of Dante
2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri (b. 1265). Dante was a poet, a politician, a philosopher, and a theologian. He is best known for his masterpiece, La Commedia, known to anglophone readers as The Divine...
Kanye the Pious
If you were to read half-a-dozen reviews of Kanye West’s latest album, Donda — and I recommend that you don’t —you would learn chiefly that West is a bad person. He’s a bad person for associating with social undesirables; he’s...
Book Review: Black Fundamentalists by Daniel Bare
Daniel Bare. Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 272 pp, $30. I was born and raised in the Pentecostal church, steeped and simmered in the rhythms of the AOG...
Market Apocalypse
Rodney Clapp. Naming Neo-Liberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021. 250 pp, $24.00 In recent years liberalism has been on the ropes. Not the liberalism of the Democratic Party, where the L-word means “left of center.” Liberalism...
We Became American: Why the Right is Wrong about Afghan Refugees
In 1969, my father escaped Libya in the back of a Red Cross ambulance just after Moammar Qaddafi overthrew King Idris I. Just six years old, my father, along with my aunts and grandparents, fled directly from Tripoli to Baltimore, where he lived for...
Laughter and Simplicity: Why Didn’t the Monad Cross the Road?
Q. Why didn’t the monad cross the road? A. Because it lacks spatial location.
Starfish Stories
At the climax of the recent wannabe-blockbuster film The Suicide Squad[1], a giant mind-controlling starfish is wreaking havoc across a nondescript non-American city when the team of super-villains (who are, from a story perspective, the heroes of the movie) must...
Book Review: Enjoying the Bible by Matthew Mullins
Matthew Mullins. Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021. 224 pp, $22.99. I stood before my class of mostly unengaged private Christian school students in a small Texas town. Masks covered the bottom...