Category: Society
Betraying Tyndale: Notes Against Propaganda
I think this essay is maybe about my parents, particularly my mother, but it’s also about what they taught me and how that relates to the turmoil currently roiling America’s public life. My mom’s formal education ended with a high-school...
Racism and Whiteness: Bad Words We Have to Live With
Like anyone who has thought about the problem of race for more than five minutes, I find the topic of language and terminology vexing. Terms like racism, anti-blackness, ethnocentric, antiracist, white supremacy, whiteness, prejudice, (and now quite unfortunately) woke or...
Know Thyself: What Medieval Christians Teach Us About Humility
“Are Americans humble?” a family member asked as I explained part of my dissertation on medieval humility to him. “Um… I don’t really think so. Not generally,” I awkwardly mumbled. This answer was unsatisfactory; firstly, because I bungled it. Secondly,...
Critical Theory as Method, Metanarrative, and Mood
In a recent article in First Things, “Evangelicals and Race Theory,” Carl Trueman enters into an increasingly contentious intramural debate amongst American evangelicals about the place of Critical Race Theory (and Critical Theory more broadly) in the life of the...
Purity Culture
So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” (Matthew 27:24) Our contemporary culture has...
Pam Against Posturing: On the Michael Scott Theory of Social Class
Let me preface this by claiming that beauty forms the moral imagination. Aesthetics shape our ethics, in ways both problematic and promising. How does this relate to Michael Scott? Because few of my coworkers have been transformed by encounters with...
Third Places and the Horizons of Male Friendships
“I want you to read this article and tell me what you think,” my wife texted me. She had sent me an article published in Harper’s Bazaar entitled, “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden.” The article details...
COVID-19, One Year On, Pt. I: Threnody for a Buried Nation
One year ago tonight, I sat in the bar of the Hotel George in downtown Washington, DC, waiting for my friend to arrive. The TV in the corner was tuned to ESPN, but for once there was no game on....
Book Review: Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley
“It is precisely because the Christian faith is the recognition of a work of God—a work that began in the dawn of time and continues in this era—that its essence is a fruit of the ages, while its form is...
Surprised by Suffering: God’s Megaphone to Technocratic Man
A year into this pandemic, I think back to my earliest reflections on what God might be doing through it. These were largely sidelined as a result of the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the chaos surrounding...