Category: Society
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...
That Others May Live: Fetal Cell Lines and Vaccine Production
The world breathed a collective sigh of relief at news that multiple vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 were found to be effective. No sooner had this news reached us before there was a moral greaseball gumming up...
Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family
Maxine Eichner was a lawyer with a new baby girl. At work, she felt pressured to keep up with the long work hours of her peers, but in her heart, she longed to be home with her baby. One day,...
This Gruesome Guest
Nihilism is at our door: whence comes this most gruesome of all guests to us? —Friedrich Nietzsche[1] If nihilism devalues even the highest of values, we can state with a fair amount of certainty that we are living in it...
Honor Thy Boomer
Boomers have had all the luck of cod in a cask in recent generational warfare. Lyman Stone declared at The Atlantic that “The Boomers Ruined Everything.” Joseph Sternberg accuses the Boomer bloc of The Theft of a Decade, stealing Millenials’...
Who’s Your Authority?: Notes on Ideology and Enemies
I don’t think it would be fair to blame my father for his distrust of authority. Growing up in 1960s Jim Crow Alabama, in a hardscrabble, blue-collar family that aspired for white-collar status, he didn’t have particularly good influences. He...