Category: Society
Suffering Our Forefathers’ Sins: A Latino’s Reflection on White Supremacy
Two Saturdays ago mi esposa and I mourned for those devastated by the El Paso shooting. For us, this hit home. We had lived in the Lone Star State for seven years, our daughter was born there, and we have...
Possessed in America
In the wake of mass shootings over the past few years, I’ve frequently thought about Doestoevsky’s novel about terrorism in Russia, Demons, sometimes known as The Possessed. The latter, older title is bad translation but good sociology. We spend too...
Post-Liberalism and American Racism
Recently Adam Serwer published a piece in The Atlantic characterizing the current conversation about liberalism amongst American conservatives as essentially being a sustained, intellectualized temper tantrum thrown over their loss of power. Ross Douthat has done the main work in critiquing...
Against An Economy Financed by Human Bodies
By Andreas Vesalius During my teenage years, I experienced periods of intense disdain for my physicality. In becoming fully aware of my sexuality and my existence as a sexual being, I came to oppose such an existence. I envied the...
Book Review: Between Life and Death by Kathryn Butler
In their indispensable book Reclaiming the Body, Joel Shuman and Brian Volck recall a course on literature and medicine taught to 4th-year medical students. Students were asked to describe how they hoped to die with essays, and the results were...
A Review of Walter Strickland’s “Liberation and Black Theological Method”
By Matthew Emerson Walter R. Strickland II. “Liberation and Black Theological Method: A Historical Analysis.” Ph.D. Diss: University of Aberdeen, 2017. Summary Despite common historical pressures that gave rise to its distinctive tasks and goals, Black Theology is not a...
Love in the Time of Jordan Peterson
The decline of marriage in the United States has become a cause for hand wringing, especially among our ruling class of centrist pundits who man the battlestations of our nation’s indispensable middle-brow newspapers. The emerging conventional wisdom? The current, well...
The Real Place for Conflict: On Keeping Controversy Close to Home
By Justin Frank Social media gives unprecedented opportunities to know about and engage in controversy. Many of these controversies are rooted in places far from us; involve people we’ve never met (and will likely never know); and grow out of...
The Burden of Parenting: In Praise of Christian Simplicity
North America, in many places, is in the throes of a decadence which it cannot justify, but which it will not live without. For decades, North America has consumed more than its share of resources, and now, for a variety...
“Easier For People To Be Good”: Ten Theses on the Bible, Poverty, and Justice
Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day wrote about building “that kind of society where it is easier for people to be good”. While Maurin and Day were very much against statism (PDF) and would probably disagree with a number of the...