Category: Culture
Gaming and the Metaverse
Officially, I am a high-school English teacher. I lead discussions, assign important texts, and grade essays (slower than I should… Christmas cards from my students often read like bribes: “Merry Christmas and please grade our Narrative Essay”). But once or...
An Education for Lincoln’s Heaven
In a 2013 article on ‘Christian Schooling and Racial Realities,’ Hunter Baker concluded that while “the racial unification of the American church might best begin in the Christian schoolhouse” he lamented that it is a “mission … awaiting a champion...
Seminary Anxiety
Everyone here bites their nails. I first noticed this last Fall and the realization was at once troubling and consoling. Troubling, because this is a child’s bad habit; consoling, because at least I’m not the only one who hasn’t used...
Shame
Shame is, amongst other things, the problem of how to understand yourself and your relationship to neighbor in the aftermath of offending or hurting your neighbor. Given the fragmentation of our society, we shouldn’t be surprised that no one seems...
From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith
Louis Markos is the beloved and brilliant Professor of English at Houston Baptist University. He is a prolific author, leading expert on C.S. Lewis, and has a keen interest in ancient Greece and Rome. All of these and more come...
The Masculinity Crisis is an Economic Crisis
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has led to much reflection on the state of the modern evangelical soul. One thing that stood out from the podcast is that Driscoll and many like him have capitalized on the perception...
Resting in Finitude
Kelly Kapic. You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022. 272 pp, $24.99. After another too-short-but oh-so-long day of unfinished projects, unfulfilled promises to my kids, overdue assignments, and too-fast...
The Self is a Problem
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality,...
The Three Ages of Christian American Exceptionalism
In 1789, Otobo Cugoano, a freed slave and a Christian, wrote in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery against those who claimed that the manstealing and enslavement of Africans was justified by the fact that some of...
On Loving Newcastle
Michael Chaplin. Newcastle United Stole My Heart: Sixty Years in Black and White. London: Hurst and Co, 2021. 280pp, $25.00. The first thing to say is that Michael Chaplin’s Newcastle United Stole My Heart is one of the most delightfully...