Category: Culture
The Act of Love That Preserves All Other Acts of Love
We are told that shortly a great many jobs will cross the event horizon of the techno-singularity, and thus will, like a ship passing over the actual horizon, disappear — probably forever. Mostly we think about the jobs of burger...
The Right Instructions
In his piece on the Thorburn affair in Australia, Simon Kennedy offered an important and, to my knowledge, mostly new contribution to the entire negative world discourse. Though he mentioned the idea of “winsomeness” being the problem, he also proposed...
After After Virtue
Jon Askonas’ Compact piece does not bury the lede. Conservatism has failed, in his view, and it has failed because it mistook the problem at hand. It mistook the seismic shift of technology for a simple lack. Askonas writes that...
Too Large for One Life: On Friction and Sustaining Tradition
There’s a tremendous gap between making an argument for tradition and inviting someone into a living tradition. In his Compact essay, “Why Conservatism Failed,” Jon Askonas argues that conservatives have retreated prematurely to the world of ideas and abandoned the...
Negative World Arrives in Australia
It didn’t take long, but we can now say that Aaron Renn and James Wood have been vindicated. Their recent analyses of our cultural moment and strategies for Christian cultural engagement have been proven right by recent events in Australia....
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...
Holographic Spurgeons and AI Sermons
At a fête for one of evangelicalism’s largest online media outfits, a colleague shared how he asked GPT-3, a language AI, what the Bible says about transgenderism. The AI produced a cogent theological explanation with Biblical citations. A senior editor...
Why We Never Move Past the Gospel of John
David Ford is Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. The following interview revolves around Ford’s latest book, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary. The Gospel of John: A Theological...
Platforms Aren’t the Problem
In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explore how healthy democracies descend into authoritarianism. Counterintuitively, “Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.” A nation elects a demagogic figure who uses executive power to take control of the...
When the Therapeutic Replaces Sin
Chuck DeGroat. When Narcissicism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020. 200 pp, $24. (originally published in Digital Liturgies) Imagine the following scenario. You are approached by two people in your church,...