The Archive

Every essay.

Gracy OlmsteadFamilyFeatured

Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family

If the American people care about the family, it's high time we start to act like it because, as two recent books show, the American family is struggling.

Kirsten SandersFamilyFeaturedAnthropology

Tethered Still

I am a mother and a theologian. These two facts belong together, inextricable as they are for me and my experience of them. I was pregnant with my first child as I began my doctoral work; I carried her to […]

Eric MillerFeaturedEducationEconomics and Business

The Market Made Me Do It: The Scandal of the Evangelical College

Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind turned twenty-five last year. If we know a classic by its ability to speak across eras, one single event from this past summer is enough to assure everyone of the continuing tragic […]

Mike AustinFeaturedCurrent Politics

Guns and the Shaping of Character

One of the questions that seldom comes up in gun debates is the ways in which gun ownership and use can shape character for good and for bad.

Joy ClarksonFeaturedEducation

Against Textbooks: Why We Need Bigger Stories

Textbooks are often harmful to education because they reduce complex disciplines down to bite-sized facts which can be learned and repeated on a test.

Tessa CarmanFeatured

Jane Austen and Christian Hope: On "Austen Years" by Rachel Cohen

Rachel Cohen. The Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020. 304 pp, $28. “We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been […]

Gracy OlmsteadFeaturedCreation Care

The Cost of Food in America

Food in America is not actually cheap. It is, in fact, quite costly—to the health of food workers, the happiness of animals, and the life of the land.

Brad EdwardsFeaturedCultureTechnologyChurch

The Church Amongst the Counter-Institutions

I watched The Social Dilemma far later than most people not living under a rock. I expected a serious documentary that forecasted serious consequences with a tone of (even more) serious urgency and fear to drive the point home. If […]

Stephen G. AdubatoFeatured

The Danger of Respectable Christianity

Since its first season premiered on Netflix in 2016, The Crown has garnered attention from viewers, critics, and from the members of the royal family whose lives it portrays. The series’ fourth season, which was released late last year, has […]

Justin HawkinsFeaturedAnthropology

Dignity Beyond Accomplishment

“The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to quantify, to classify, and to punish. It establishes over others a visibility through […]

Samuel JamesFeaturedBooks

When the Therapeutic Replaces Sin

Chuck DeGroat. When Narcissicism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020. 200 pp, $24. (originally published in Digital Liturgies) Imagine the following scenario. You are approached by two people in your church, […]

Tessa CarmanFeaturedCultureCreation CareJournalJournal 3

Following Christ in the Machine Age: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth

How do we stay human in a technocratic age? How do we live rooted lives —spiritually and otherwise — in an unsettled time? How do we make sense of life in the modern world? English writer Paul Kingsnorth has been […]