Category: Culture
My AI Spiritual Director
After years working as a doctor in a hospital, a friend shared the most frustrating part of her job: patients whose online, amateur medical research weighs more heavily in their decision making than her professional opinion. She ended with a...
No Reluctant Father
In his book Attached to God, Krispin Mayfield tells the story of how Mr. Rogers, the patron saint of unconditional positive regard, questioned his own standing before God on his deathbed.[1] Alluding to Matthew 25, Mr. Rogers asked his wife...
Dante Was Right: Suffering and Our Journey Toward God
“Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself/ In a dark wood, the right road lost.” These are the famous opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy and, even if you hate what follows, their brevity and archetypal power are hard...
Untangling Theology from Digital Technology
A few years ago I received an advance copy of a book on the end times by a well-loved and influential pastor. Most of the book was standard, biblically faithful reflections. The most interesting section, however, argued that the European...
The Hollowness of the Mainline, Now and Then
Douglas J. Brouwer Chasing After Wind: A Pastor’s Life. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022. 238 pp. $22.00 It’s no secret that Western Christianity is in decline. And this is nowhere more evident than in the once venerable churches of the mainline....
Book Interview: The Thrill of Orthodoxy: Rediscovering the Adventure of Christian Faith by Trevin Wax
Trevin Wax is vice president of research and resource development at the North American Mission Board. He is also a visiting professor at Cedarville University. The following interview revolves around his recently released book, The Thrill of Orthodoxy. The Thrill...
Small and Afraid and Without Knowledge
On May 11, 1997, a computer program won a chess match against a world champion for the first time in history. The defeated Garry Kasparov said that after Game 5, “he had become so dispirited that he felt the match...
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...