Category: Society
How (Not) to Watch the Beautiful Game
Growing up Monday mornings were either a delight or a dread depending on which football — what a minority of the world calls soccer — team you supported. If your team had lost over the weekend, you were in for...
Esther and the Theology of Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is our most Christian holiday. Just ask the Puritans. They did not give us Thanksgiving as an annual holiday after a great feast to celebrate a year of survival in America and then say, “This was fun, let’s do...
Rich Christians in an Age of Competing Obligations
Christianity is a religion of seemingly impossible paradoxes, and the Christian life is a series of decisions made within a set of difficult, often excruciating tensions. The simplest paradoxes are the purely theological ones: Jesus is fully God and man;...
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...
When Permanent Contraception Can Be Licit
Alex and Sarah are Christians who have been married for five years. They have 2 children and would like to have more. However, they feel called to adopt as the route to parenting more children. Their only hesitation is that...
Flawed Myths
Lyz Lenz. Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. New York: Bold Type Books, 2020. 240pp, $26. At church, I was taught that if a woman denied sex to her husband, he would find sex elsewhere. At church,...
The Discipleship of Work
When we moved to our farm several years ago with a toddler and newborn in tow, we mainly had it in mind to experience a bit of the country life: to plant a large garden and perhaps raise a few...
How to Value Caring Work
Immediately before Jesus institutes the sacrament of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he kneels before his disciples to wash their feet. Peter objects to being served by his Lord, finding it improper, but Jesus tells him that, “Unless I...
The Something More of Sex
In a strikingly vulnerable 2018 New York Times article, author Courtney Sender casts a light on today’s impoverished sexual norms by describing her own disappointing experience. Her date, a connection through Tinder, requested Sender’s consent for nearly everything. Kissing. Undressing....
A Puritan Founding?
Earlier this year Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry published The Flag + the Cross, a sociological expose on what they identified as the threat to American democracy from what they called white Christian nationalism. It’s a work of sociology more...