Category: Featured
Memento Mori: Death in the West Through the Ages
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2, KJV) … Late in the fall I stood at the graveside, the cutting...
The Something More of Sex
In a strikingly vulnerable 2018 New York Times article, author Courtney Sender casts a light on today’s impoverished sexual norms by describing her own disappointing experience. Her date, a connection through Tinder, requested Sender’s consent for nearly everything. Kissing. Undressing....
Preventing Destructive Leadership: Some Reflections for Elders
We ought to be aware by now of the danger of destructive leaders. 2020 brought two important books addressing the issue, Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to the Church and Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer’s A Church Called Tov. Russell...
A Ride Worth Leaving: Escaping the Anxiety of the Modern Church
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:9 Imagine a windmill with its blade turning in the breeze. The blade of...
Kichijiro Was Right
You’ve probably heard this one before: a masked gunman bursts into church one day and fires a few rounds into the ceiling. “Everyone who believes in Jesus is getting shot today! Everyone who wants to deny Him can leave!” He...
A Puritan Founding?
Earlier this year Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry published The Flag + the Cross, a sociological expose on what they identified as the threat to American democracy from what they called white Christian nationalism. It’s a work of sociology more...
Objects of Doubt
Three months to live. That was what my father heard when he went into the Mayo clinic for treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the Spring of 1986. That proved accurate. My father made his living on the business-side of health...
Panic
My friend Rod Dreher recently argued from his blog that we have hit a point in the trans revolution where a moral panic is appropriate, saying:
Threnody for a Good Man
Mat Feltner died at a hospital in Lincoln this week. Obviously it wasn’t Feltner himself — he lives nowhere outside of the mind of Wendell Berry, the pages of his novels, and the imaginations of the many thousands of us...
Schmemann’s Vision of a Sacramental World and the Reformed Tradition
Alexander Schmemann is a window into a theological world much different than typically encountered in American evangelical circles. With a faith firmly grounded in the Russian Orthodox theological tradition and speaking determinedly into late-modern Western life, Schmemann has intrigued many...