Good Work
We hunted for steel along flat-bottom train rails—glass blanketing the gravel track bed like chicken feed, jimson weed between creosote-steeped timbers— picked over buckled trailers and garbage stacks: cracked pump heads, mower blades, band saws rusted mid-cut. The clang of...
Let Us Now Praise Fractious Men: The Hillbilly as Economic Dissident
Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir, strikes a delicate balance between family history and cultural commentary. In the book, Vance draws on his memories of an unstable family in a stagnant small town to paint a vivid picture of the...
Book Review: 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
Before they get carried away, the Christians now tuning into Jordan Peterson need to realize that this man is not the next C.S. Lewis. On the contrary, Jordan Peterson is the man C.S. Lewis warned them about. It’s not that...
Conscientious Producerism
In an earlier post on this site, I wrote that Christians must “consider how their productive activities—who they sell their labor to or where they invest their capital—can grow out of their convictions.” Yet the suggestion that some occupations are...
Book Review: Children of Men by P. D. James
All dystopian literature aspires to prophecy. Whether or not it aims to predict the future, it imagines worlds in which the evils of our own place and time are drawn out to their logical conclusions. It holds up a mirror...
Reviewing Adalbert Stifter’s “Rock Crystal”
When I was 12 years old, I took a walk in the woods and I got lost. It wasn’t just me: it was the day after Thanksgiving and there were five of us. My cousin Daniel was the oldest, 13,...
Reviewing Radicalism: When Reform Becomes Revolution
In 2017, many Protestants will observe the 500th anniversary of their revolution—or at least of its most celebrated image: the promulgation of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Though inevitably drowned out by triumphalism, some such observances will be understandably ambivalent about the...
Five Theses on Christianity and Political Economy
For too long, evangelicals have taken the party line on economic issues without bringing any distinct principles of their own to the conversation. I think Brad Littlejohn is right. America’s current political moment is an opportune one for evangelicals, and...