Category: Culture
Book Excerpt: Either Way, We’ll Be All Right by Eric Tonjes
The cross is not simply about rescue but also about restoration. The cross is not primarily about escape from some future punishment but rather about healing our relationship with God. Christ’s death brings us back into communion with our Creator:...
Book Review: Reparations by Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson
I In Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance & Repair (Brazos Press, 2021), Presbyterian Church in America ministers Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson lay out their biblical and historical case for the American church making reparations to African Americans....
The Austen Years: A Review in Six Movements
Rachel Cohen. The Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020. 304 pp, $28. “We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been...
Review: Cajetan on Sacred Doctrine by Hieromonk Gregory Hrynkiw
Hieromonk Gregory Hrynkiw. Cajetan on Sacred Doctrine. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020. 352 pp. $75 If your theological education was anything like mine, you learned that Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, was Martin Luther’s grand inquisitor....
The Hole in Our Soul Care: Searching for a Road Forward for Pastoral Care
Early in his book The Logic of the Body: Retrieving Theological Psychology, Matthew LaPine comments that, unfortunately, “there is a path out of the church that runs through the counselor’s office” (p. 36). As a Christian and a counselor I...
The Danger of Respectable Christianity
Since its first season premiered on Netflix in 2016, The Crown has garnered attention from viewers, critics, and from the members of the royal family whose lives it portrays. The series’ fourth season, which was released late last year, has...
The Church Amongst the Counter-Institutions
I watched The Social Dilemma far later than most people not living under a rock. I expected a serious documentary that forecasted serious consequences with a tone of (even more) serious urgency and fear to drive the point home. If...
I Am a Unit of One
After Jiang Qing married Mao Zedong in 1938, Communist leadership informed her that to join the Communist movement, she would need to submit her will to a work unit. Qing, who before her marriage to Mao was an aspiring actress,...
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...
Sin for Its Own Sake? The Theft of the Pears and the Divine Image in Augustine’s Confessions
The complex recounting of the “theft of the pears” in Book 2 of his Confessions is often distilled into Augustine’s famous evaluation of the act: “I simply wanted to enjoy the theft for its own sake, and the sin” (nec...