Corporations Can’t Love You
In a recent guest column at Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study, Wendy Robinson wrote about her forays into the world of Peloton, on a growing phenomenon: the lack of community which people find within the ecosystems created by consumer products.[1]...
How “Isolation” Helps Us Understand Sin
Loneliness and even estrangement we are familiar with, but isolation? Is this too strong a term to describe the ways in which sin afflicts our common life? The skepticism of this nomenclature, I think, is twofold. First, it may come...
Christianity and Culture in an Age of Crisis
Christian concerns with the culture go all the way back, dating beyond the legacies of Justin Martyr and Augustine to the earliest generations of Christians. But even here, in the first centuries, negotiations with culture were not straightforward: for every...
Engagement Without Fear: Responding to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
To anyone paying attention to church participation in North America over the last forty years, things are not now, nor have they been, very good. The jeremiads have been spoken, the eulogies written, and the post-mortem begun, while the patient...
Advent II: Expectant Waiting
As 2020 has lingered on, I have watched as marker after marker of a year’s progression have been overtaken by an endless sea of sameness: one weekend blurs into the next, one Zoom call into the next. The rhythms of...
Book Review: White Too Long by Robert P. Jones
It is no secret (and impossible, frankly, to say otherwise) that American Christianity has broadly taken the shape that it has because of race. This is not a monocausal argument for American church history which would undermine other factors such...
Book Review: From Adam and Israel to the Church by Benjamin Gladd
As one who spends a great deal of time with students who are being shaped to lead the people of God in ministry, I can tell you that much of the attention in the literature is given to the pragmatic...
What is a Nation?
In debates over the last two months, the question of whether or not Christians can be ‘nationalists’ has become one of the pressing questions to be answered. Unfortunately, the way the debate has proceeded so far makes answering the question...
Christ Ever Present, But to What Church? Reviewing Phillip Cary’s “Meaning of Protestant Theology”
The calls of warning for Protestant theology have been long in the making, or at least for a certain variety of Protestant theology. The 20th century, for all of the ecumenical exchanges which occurred, were rough times for Protestants, as...
The Burden of Parenting: In Praise of Christian Simplicity
North America, in many places, is in the throes of a decadence which it cannot justify, but which it will not live without. For decades, North America has consumed more than its share of resources, and now, for a variety...