Category: Liberal Arts
The Land is Bright
And not through eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, — how slowly! But westward — look! the land is bright. ~ A. H. Clough And so Roe is overthrown. Some...
Historians Behaving Badly
In certain regions of the Western Christian world, the opinion prevails that historians have been behaving badly of late. This opinion, in fact, extends to academics at large. From this point of view, historians are attempting to distract the faithful...
The Danger of Forgetting America’s Anti-Racist History
Jake Meador has offered a thoughtful and challenging piece concerning the relationship between Christianity and the United States. Meador’s most salient point is that he has “become very suspicious of accounts of Christianity’s place in American life that leave out...
Aardvarks and Alphabets
Just 35 miles from my home in northeast Cambodia, there lives an indigenous minority called the Kachok. There are about four thousand Kachok in nine different villages. While they are ethnically related to other tribes in our region, as well...
Why Our Churches Should Be Beautiful
In the last few decades, American churches have gotten a new look—but don’t call it a facelift. Instead, think of it more as a toning-down, as church exteriors have ridden themselves of their steeples and other religious symbols, while their...
The Third Reformer
Bruce Gordon. Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet. New Haven: Yale, 2021. xxii + 349 pp, $32.50. The contemporary of Martin Luther and predecessor of Jean Calvin within the Reformed family of churches, Ulrich Zwingli is sometimes described as “the third reformer.”...
Who is This New Man?
The rubber band of our American common life is stretched to breaking.[1] Our connections are tenuous, our politics polarizing, and our sense of civic housekeeping — where we provide for others for the common good — seems like a foreign...
Learning to See with Norman Wirzba
Soon after we moved to Australia, my family hiked in a temperate rainforest in the Yarra Ranges, an hour-and-a-half from our house. Southern Victoria is home to several of these rainforests. They challenge my prior knowledge of rainforests as places...
Hobbits and Empire: Geography and the Life of Nations in Tolkien’s Writings
As we journey through J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth, we find a remarkable variety of distinctive landscapes, from the rural towns of the Shire, to the abandoned halls of Moria, the Elvish tree-city of Lothlórien, the Forest of Drúadan, the...
The Transcendentalists and Their World
Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His widely regarded book, The Minutemen and Their World won the Bancroft Prize. The following interview revolves around...