Category: Society
Why We Are Restless
Ben and Jenna Storey met while doing their doctorates at the University of Chicago. Ben is the Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs, and Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University. Jenna is Assistant Professor of...
Book Review: Black Fundamentalists by Daniel Bare
Daniel Bare. Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 272 pp, $30. I was born and raised in the Pentecostal church, steeped and simmered in the rhythms of the AOG...
The Maniac and the Theorist: Chesterton on Critical Theory
It does not matter how beautiful a house seems, how stately its design, how lofty its ceiling, or how well intentioned its builders; a house built on sand will fall when the rain comes (Matt. 7:27). Ultimately, the premises or...
Racial Reconciliation and the Queen of the Sciences
In the 2013 book Aliens in the Promised Land, editor Anthony Bradley along with a number of other people of color who have served in predominantly white evangelical institutions explain in great detail why, as the subtitle has it, “minority...
Cultural Assimilation and the Curious Cases of Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal
After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, educator Jane Elliot held an experiment with her elementary school students that she called “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes.” The experiment became famous, and she repeated it for various audiences for years,...
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...