The Archive

Every essay.

Matthew Lee AndersonFilm Reviews/Hollywood

Don't Waste your Blackjack: Holy Rollers and Christian Gamblers

[vimeo 32338361 600 338] What Ben Mezrich did for card counters in Bringing down the House, Bryan Storkel aims to do for The Church Team, a now defunct group of

Matthew Lee AndersonSocial Justice

American Power and Millenial Social Activism

My friend Dan Parris makes an astute point about the nature of activism: If you watch [Invisible Children's] past films (or spend significant time in that part of

Cate MacDonaldFormation

One Thing

Sitting in class with Dr. Coe was always different. Different from other teachers, different from the same class last week, different from anything we’d done before. And yet there’

Jake Meador

A Failure of Storytelling: Kony 2012 and the Social Imagination

In a private security meeting in 1960 with President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained that the soon-to-be-independent Congo was a diplomatic quagmire for the United States. The nation possessed enormous mineral wealth and if the United […]

Andrew WalkerPolitical Theology

Of Foils & Scapegoats: Evangelicals & Partisanship

There is no more of a popular and easy target for young evangelicals to skewer than a church wedded to political conservatism. Simply recounting the charts, the statistics, and the

Matthew Lee AndersonPolitics

Conscience and Conservatives: What role should it play in public debate?

We’ve all been whipped into a frenzy over Rush Limbaugh’s idiotic insults of a Georgetown law student, a controversy I have been fastidiously trying to ignore.  Errors often compound faster than interest, and responding to one outlandish statement with apoplexy […]

Matthew Lee AndersonEconomics and Business

Poverty, the Limits of Materialism, and George MacDonald

Christianity Today recently put together a peculiarly insufficient list of ways to help the poor that was ably and summarily criticized by Peter Greer, whose work with Hope International stands somewhere in the nexus of awesome and jaw-dropping. But they […]

Matthew Lee AndersonEconomics and Business

The (A)Morality of Material Resources

Following up on yesterday's musings about the proper distribution of material resources, I thought I'd walk through a bit more O'Donovan for us all.

Matthew Lee AndersonEconomics and Business

A few thoughts on Wealth Inequality

What sort of problem is wealth inequality, if it is a problem at all? That's the question that's been ably posed to me by a commenter,

Matthew Lee AndersonCollege and University

Upon the Occasion of John Mark Reynolds Moving to Houston Baptist

My friend John Mark Reynolds just announced this evening that he is leaving his position as Director to become the new provost at Houston Baptist University.* In the common parlance,

Matthew Lee AndersonEvangelicalism

The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right

There are few books that I wish every evangelical under the age of forty would read:  Jon Shields’ The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right is one of them. Shields’

Matthew Lee AndersonFormation

Lent and the Joys of Self-Control

Interesting thoughts from my friend Mark Galli on the role and meaning of Lent, much of which overlap with worries I've articulated elsewhere about our sanctification being reduced