Category: Ethics
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...
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...
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...
Good Work
We hunted for steel along flat-bottom train rails—glass blanketing the gravel track bed like chicken feed, jimson weed between creosote-steeped timbers— picked over buckled trailers and garbage stacks: cracked pump heads, mower blades, band saws rusted mid-cut. The clang of...
A Theology of Money
Among the many sayings of Jesus that have echoed down through the ages, few have continued to sound so loudly or uncomfortably in our ears as his warning, “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” But this does not keep...
Following Christ in the Machine Age: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
How do we stay human in a technocratic age? How do we live rooted lives —spiritually and otherwise — in an unsettled time? How do we make sense of life in the modern world? English writer Paul Kingsnorth has been...
The Triviality of Pro-Choice Memes
Last week SCOTUS handed down its decision in the Dobbs case and changed the course of American legal, moral, and, well, general history, by striking down Roe v. Wade, ending the nation-wide regime of abortion-on-demand across virtually all nine months...
60 Questions for Pro-Choice Christians
For many evangelicals, the leaked draft decision last month felt like the culmination of many prayers, tears, hard conversations, and difficult decisions at the voting polls. Now that Roe has fallen, the most vulnerable will now have a chance to...
The Violence We Can’t Live Without
It is easier to be violent than it is to care. That is the problem near the heart of so many of the maladies afflicting our nation today. Care costs us something. It demands something from us. If you choose...
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...