The 2018 Eliot Awards
We started this last year and I’m going to continue it this year because of how much fun I have putting it together. Here’s my list of the year’s best magazine writing. If you have other nominations, mention them in...
7 Theses on Christians and Politics for Election Day
When it comes to discussing questions of politics, Christians can take several different approaches. A safe and sometimes reasonable strategy is to put a moratorium on such conversations in Bible studies, small groups, and other church functions for the simple...
Book Review: C. S. Lewis on the Christian Life by Joe Rigney
In his book on Thomas Aquinas, the great German philosopher Josef Pieper notes that what sets Thomas apart is not his originality. It is his perfection. He then goes on to develop the distinction between the two in a striking...
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: