Book Review: Building the Benedict Option by Leah Libresco
Ever since Richard Weaver told us that “ideas have consequence,” a certain sort of conservative has relied heavily on a worldview-based analysis of culture, locating the problems that plague us in the sphere of ideas, beginning in the Ivory Tower...
Setting Fire to Modern Civilization: On Abuse and Institutions
At this point, the fact of the GOP’s acceptance of the fact that Donald Trump assaults women is well established. So too is their acceptance of the fact that Roy Moore was a pedophile. That this fact should not keep either...
Book Review: Disruptive Witness by Alan Noble
To be a faithful evangelical in 2018 is to find yourself in a difficult, frustrating position. The two defining sub-groups in the American Protestant church since 1980 have been the religious right and the seeker-sensitive church growth movement. Their primary...
Against the Sterile Style
By Ryan Hammill I am not sure what other fathers-to-be think about as they sit in hospital waiting rooms. With a pregnant wife still a few months out from delivery, already I have found myself sitting here on a number...
The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way: Against the Culture War
One of the saddest consequences of the culture war is that it has managed to make people boring. The culture war has made us predictable, even if individual people are anything but. The libertarian online troll is in real life...
The Fall of the Village
There’s a movie scene I’ve been thinking about this week in which a pastor and a journalist sit down to talk about their home city. The pastor offers his help to the newly appointed editor and says, “I find that...
Can There Be Mercy in Trump’s America?
Early last week our president, when responding to a sheriff’s comment about a member of a violent immigrant gang, said that:
On the Pence Rule
In Hannah Coulter Wendell Berry tells the sad and predictable story of the divorce of Marcus and Margaret Settlemeyer. The two marry after finishing school at the University of Kentucky and quickly move to Louisville to get work as teachers, both...
Book Review: Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
One of the smartest observations made about Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option came, unsurprisingly, from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
The Crisis in Christian Discipline and the Opportunity Before Us
We are long overdue for a sustained argument about the purpose and means of church discipline as well as the broader role of Christian discipline in the life of individual Christians and Christian communities. By church discipline, I mean some...