Category: Society
Ahmaud Arbery and “National Conversations”
Under ordinary circumstances, the arrest of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers might have prompted another national conversation on race, which is what we call it when family members who don’t talk in real life argue on Facebook, and invite long-lost high school...
Keep Christianity Weird
Oliver O’Donovan begins the sixth chapter of his Desire of the Nations, a chapter concerned with the status and legitimacy of Christendom, by considering what made the political witness of the early church compelling:
Thinking Christianly About the Ahmaud Arbery Lynching
Let’s start here. This is what we know about what happened in February in Brunswick GA when Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed according to the New York Times: BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Ahmaud Arbery loved to run. It was how...
Lynching Then and Lynching Now: Racial Justice as Christian Imperative
The United States has a long history of racial terror lynchings. Particularly from the Civil War until this day, thousands of Black men, women and children have been indiscriminately killed for a myriad of reasons. When that killing took place...
Crisis of Vulnerability
I once pronounced 2020 as my personal recovery year. My wife and I were looking over my calendar and feeling almost giddy—no air travel, no moving dates, no surprises. It was October 2019 and she had spent a couple weeks...
Cats and Sixty Foot Whales: Reflections on Children’s Books
The most expensive preschools in America bear a pine-scented resemblance to those senna-tinted photographs of a world before plastics, albeit with no unseemly hint of poverty. Within the world of Waldorf, Montessori and Wild Forest schools the hand dominates the...
The Ethics of Healthcare Rationing
The call comes in the middle of my clinic session at the hospital in rural Kenya where I work. I apologize to the patient in front of me and answer my phone. It’s the emergency department at the hospital in...
Deaths of Despair and Lives of Hope in a Cynical Age
Upon falling into the hands of Giant Despair, Christian and his friend Hopeful were imprisoned without any provisions for days on end and while enduring beatings. In John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian eventually laments, “Brother, what shall we...
The Perpetual Motion Machine and the Pandemic
My grandmother is eighty-five years old. She will die someday. I want her to die well and, in the meantime, to live well. She lives with my aunt about ten minutes from where I live with my wife and four...
Public Reasoning in a Pandemic: Responding to Moore, Reno, and Littlejohn
The rapidly expanding number of Covid-19 cases in the United States poses an extraordinary test of our nation’s institutions and their leaders. In recent days, a discussion has broken out about how we should integrate our interest in preserving and...