All posts by Matthew Loftus

Matthew Loftus teaches and practices Family Medicine in Baltimore and East Africa. His work has been featured in Christianity Today, Comment, & First Things and he is a regular contributor for Christ and Pop Culture. You can learn more about his work and writing at www.MatthewAndMaggie.org

Rich Christians in an Age of Competing Obligations

Christianity is a religion of seemingly impossible paradoxes, and the Christian life is a series of decisions made within a set of difficult, often excruciating tensions. The simplest paradoxes are the purely theological ones: Jesus is fully God and man;...

/ November 21, 2022

What the Body Needs

For a tech-skeptic lover of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman, as a family physician I sure picked the wrong job. Doctors have always used various technologies for treating patients, from the ancient Egyptian prescription to fumigate the womb...

/ November 2, 2022

Kichijiro Was Right

You’ve probably heard this one before: a masked gunman bursts into church one day and fires a few rounds into the ceiling. “Everyone who believes in Jesus is getting shot today! Everyone who wants to deny Him can leave!” He...

/ September 6, 2022

Who’s Going to Clean the Toilets in Your Utopia? Anna Neima’s The Utopians

Anna Neima. The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society. London: Picador, 2021. 320pp, $39.95. “I saw a horse collapse in the street: the driver was knocked aside by the starving people, who rushed to cut chunks from the...

/ May 13, 2022

More Than Lip Service: Reviewing Two Books on Holistic Healing

When I started reading Amy Julia Becker’s new book To Be Made Well and Liuan Huska’s Hurting Yet Whole,[1] I was gripped instantly by the opening anecdotes. I had something of a reputation during my Family Medicine residency for attracting...

/ March 15, 2022

Trauma, Attachment, and Self-Care: What Everyone Should Know

Trauma. Once a word that solely referred to a physical wound, it is now far more popularly discussed with regards to psychological wounds. One can read dozens of books about trauma and find countless memes floating around discussing it, but...

/ November 12, 2021

“Biopolitics” Are Unavoidable

In the struggle to fight COVID-19, terms like “public health” and “community health” have been bandied about in an attempt to describe the ways in which our health as individuals is not dependent on ourselves alone. Wendell Berry says: “I...

/ September 28, 2021

Starfish Stories

At the climax of the recent wannabe-blockbuster film The Suicide Squad[1], a giant mind-controlling starfish is wreaking havoc across a nondescript non-American city when the team of super-villains (who are, from a story perspective, the heroes of the movie) must...

/ August 18, 2021

Racism and Whiteness: Bad Words We Have to Live With

Like anyone who has thought about the problem of race for more than five minutes, I find the topic of language and terminology vexing. Terms like racism, anti-blackness, ethnocentric, antiracist, white supremacy, whiteness, prejudice, (and now quite unfortunately) woke or...

/ May 12, 2021

A Shot Off the Mark: Reviewing Christakis’s “Apollo’s Arrow”

The most interesting part of Nicholas Christakis’ new book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live is, unfortunately, its title. The book was mostly written in August 2020, published in October 2020, and...

/ March 30, 2021