Dragons in the Deep Places
Ross Douthat’s new book, a memoir of his experience with chronic illness, is far more than that simple description would suggest. It recounts, in excruciating detail, his journey with Lyme disease, which began in 2015. It tells of the pain...
A Legacy of Letters: Living and Dying Well in the Lives of My Great-Grandparents
A tiny Bella, wearing a striped sweater and a mostly toothless grin. My parents, glowingly happy with their new baby. My three great-grandparents, seemingly ageless.
Why (Not) Masking Matters: A Dissent
Without qualification, masking has been one of the most contentious issues for church leaders to face over the last two years. For some, it is a matter of health and preserving life. For others, it is a matter of liberty...
We All Have the Power of Caligula Now
The logic, spirit, and economy of contemporary pornography is a near-perfect reflection of society’s failure to provide us with the tools necessary to meet the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging. Pornography assumes that we are each our own and belong to ourselves....
“Those Heathenish Christians”: John Robinson’s Warning to the Puritans and to Us
“You will say they deserved it,” wrote the Separatist pastor John Robinson in 1623, after he first heard about the killings. The recipient of this letter was Pilgrim leader William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony in America. Robinson had...
A Numbing Blow: Baptism as Illiberalism
“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers,” wrote the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. He was pointing out in his inimitable way how the course of our lives unfold from an act over...
The Bottoming Out of the American Evangelical Church
The long shadow of 2016 continues to stretch over the church. I recently attended a social event held outdoors. Masking was the most immediately visible demarcation of political lines among a large group of professing Christians; but behind the masks,...
What Is a Smartphone?: A Thomistic Analysis
You understand almost nothing about your smartphone. I can prove it by asking a simple question: what is a smartphone? I suspect you will find difficulty articulating a definition which avoids either tautology or obvious error. But another simple question...
Sailing and the Christian Life
“But here and there it shines out with a great and flashing beauty, like a light set upon a high place above the stormy or tranquil waters where we voyage. And the sceptic will say: is the beacon for me,...
“Biopolitics” Are Unavoidable
In the struggle to fight COVID-19, terms like “public health” and “community health” have been bandied about in an attempt to describe the ways in which our health as individuals is not dependent on ourselves alone. Wendell Berry says: “I...