Category: Society
Who’s Going to Clean the Toilets in Your Utopia? Anna Neima’s The Utopians
Anna Neima. The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society. London: Picador, 2021. 320pp, $39.95. “I saw a horse collapse in the street: the driver was knocked aside by the starving people, who rushed to cut chunks from the...
Marilynne Robinson Imagines the Soul of America
Living there, you’ll be free, if you truly wish to be.” ~Gene Wilder, Pure Imagination The frigid breeze gusting through downtown Des Moines, Iowa, did little to help the Democratic Nominee for President, Joe Biden, as he struggled to project...
On Healing: Learning from Separatists
The idea of a black nation seems so far-fetched as to be ludicrous, but if you entertain it for a minute, even as an impossible dream, it should give you a feeling of wholeness and belonging you’ve never had and...
Friendship Through a Pandemic: Seeing More Clearly With Stanley Hauerwas
Ephraim Radner and others have recently reflected that the church’s theologians have said shockingly little about the pandemic that’s really been helpful, that’s helped Christians think clearly about this global crisis. To get our heads straight, minds clear, and hearts...
“Unpaid Gestation” and the Abolition of the Family
Every day, 385,000 newborn babies enter the world. A fledgling group of theorists and writers is interested in reimagining how we think about these births and the children they produce. Using the provocative tagline “Abolish the Family,” this group of...
A Theology of Infertility
After years of secondary infertility, my wife and I discovered she was pregnant on Father’s Day of 2016. It was a stunning moment for us, a seemingly miraculous answer to prayers that we had mostly given up on. But three...
Black Patriotism and National Conservatism
I watched Glenn Loury’s address at the second National Conservatism conference around the time of the event with great interest. Since then, I’ve also seen the print version of it in First Things. You can view the video of the...
More Than Lip Service: Reviewing Two Books on Holistic Healing
When I started reading Amy Julia Becker’s new book To Be Made Well and Liuan Huska’s Hurting Yet Whole,[1] I was gripped instantly by the opening anecdotes. I had something of a reputation during my Family Medicine residency for attracting...
Eyes to See: On Disability, Spiritual Sight, and the Holy Spirit
When I was pregnant with my son David Samuel, born in the heat of last July, I wondered if I could make a sort of bargain with God. I knew David would be disabled, and I prayed either that God...
Resignations and Reunions: Industrialism’s Broken Promises
An epochal shift is underway; one that social scientists will dissect for decades. And it doesn’t bode well for corporate America. In what economists are calling ‘The Great Resignation’, one-third of the employed workforce—over 47 million laborers—quit their jobs in...