Category: Culture
Book Review: History and Eschatology by N. T. Wright
History and Eschatology is a dense but rewarding book based on NT Wright’s Gifford Lectures, in which Wright is attempting to redirect natural theology, bringing history and biblical exegesis to the questions of natural theology to see if that “might...
Catholicism in the Swamp: A Response to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
Ed. note: This is the third and final response in our symposium on Brandon McGinley’s book The Prodigal Church. The American landscape has been a fertile seedbed historically for a very specific sort of Christianity. Methodism and Baptist expressions of the...
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...
Authenticity and Prodigality: Response to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
Ed. Note: This is the first response of three we will be publishing as part of a brief symposium on Brandon McGinley’s book The Prodigal Church. One of the ways that Catholics tell the story of modernity—think for instance of Charles...
2020 Eliot Awards
Since 2017, I’ve made a habit of going back at the end of the year to review and recognize some of my favorite pieces in magazine and web writing from the past 12 months. Inspired by David Brooks’s old Sydney...
If Mr. Kristof Is Taking Names, Apple Should Be Next
On December 4th, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a powerful expose on the staggering amount of child pornography available on Pornhub. The article featured a politically sharp subtitle, “Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos...
Time is Always Time: Christopher Nolan, T. S. Eliot, and Creatureliness
As one of very few directors billed above his stars, Christopher Nolan was almost in with a shout at reviving post-lockdown cinema. As it turned out, the late August release of Tenet was the last gasp off an overly-optimistic pandemic...
Roger Ebert’s Dying Words
I’ve recently had Clem Snide’s latest album, Forever Just Beyond (2020), on repeat. Snide, the nom de band of Jewish-American songwriter Eef Barzelay, collaborates on the album with Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers to produce an understated, folky contemplation...
Lady Bird and the Buffered Self
“Do I look like I’m from Sacramento?” “You are from Sacramento.” Greta Gerwig’s 2018 film Lady Bird explores the relationship between identity, freedom, and givenness with painstaking attention to mundane details. An homage to her hometown of Sacramento, California, the...
Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family
Maxine Eichner was a lawyer with a new baby girl. At work, she felt pressured to keep up with the long work hours of her peers, but in her heart, she longed to be home with her baby. One day,...