The Archive

Every essay.

Erik CoonceFormation

What's Wrong with a "Rule of Life"?

The 'rule of life' concept offers some genuine value, but easily becomes a spiritualized sort of 'life hack,' merely another form of self-actualization.

Jake MeadorPolitical TheoryPolitical TheologyCurrent Politics

Saving Liberalism Requires Better Liberals

Preserving American liberalism will almost certainly require us to think of liberalism not as an ideology but as a political method.

Jake MeadorCurrent Politics

The Argument for Despair is Impenetrable

Arguments from despair become an easy way of suspending one's ordinary judgment or of tacitly coercing someone into an irrational change of mind.

Paul Frank SpencerMusic Reviews

"There's No Kingdom to Come": The Music of Hozier

It's striking that when he needs to search for hope, the materialist Irish singer Hozier somehow finds his way back to the language of Scripture.

Jake MeadorSocial Trends

Accumulated Absences

The path that leads Jayber Crow toward health and belonging is worth our attention, not least because it is now in danger of being lost.

Jake MeadorEvangelicalismFormation

Faithful Presence After the Evangelical Fracturing

Is the Hunterian project of faithful presence simply dead today, an antiquated method that can't cope with contemporary challenges? (No, it isn't.)

Andrew NobleTechnology

Learning the Sounds of Love

Love often comes to us in the local, embodied voice of those closest to us—and yet in our current moment it is getting ever harder to hear those voices.

Jake MeadorCurrent Politics

Evangelicals for Harris and the Culture of Death

If you are a Christian seeking a culture of life and justice and you support a politician in exchange for... nothing, well, nothing is what you'll receive.

Robert CottonTechnology

Augustine, AI, and the Demon Heuristic

If one considers Augustine's writings on the evil supernatural alongside certain AI 'glitches' the picture that emerges is remarkably disconcerting.

Derek KingEthics

Rescuing the Abandoned: On Embryo Adoption

Rather than making us complicit in the system, embryo adoption is a modern form of caring for abandoned children, just as the early church did in Rome.

Jake MeadorEvangelicalism

The Importance of Not Caring About Mark Driscoll

The best way forward for American Protestants will be to simply stop caring about the sociological fights that have defined 'evangelicalism' for too long.

Rebecca Brewster StevensonBook ReviewsFormation

A Mouldering Feast: The Dangers of Victimhood as Identity

To make our sufferings the center of our identity is to condemn ourselves to a life of more suffering, to cut ourselves off from hope for something better.