Category: Society
The Self is a Problem
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality,...
Finding Belonging in the City
Chad Bryant. Prague: Belonging in the Modern City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. 352pp, $29.95. Historian Chad Bryant has produced a moving and deeply informative book in Prague: Belonging in the Modern City. The book’s structure, consisting chiefly of five...
On Loving Newcastle
Michael Chaplin. Newcastle United Stole My Heart: Sixty Years in Black and White. London: Hurst and Co, 2021. 280pp, $25.00. The first thing to say is that Michael Chaplin’s Newcastle United Stole My Heart is one of the most delightfully...
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...