Category: Social Trends
An Intercourse with Ghosts: The Unabomber, Irony, and Terror
1. To write about Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, is to sit for a moment with the ghosts of his victims peering over your shoulder. The dead and the maimed, both. Just as much as you try to...
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...
If Anything Is Pro-Life, Nothing Is
“This is a pro-life issue.” By now you have probably heard this sentiment expressed about any number of issues that are not immediately related to abortion. Food stamps, taxes, healthcare—even immigration!—are designated as “pro-life” causes because they may in some...
A Brief Commendation: The Addicts Next Door
I cannot remember reading an essay that has moved me as much as Margaret Talbot’s devastating New Yorker piece on our opioid crisis. The prose is mostly unadorned, because it can be. Many of the stories Talbot recounts are so...
Reviewing Archbishop Charles Chaput’s “Strangers in a Strange Land”
We’re pleased to publish this review by Dr. Miles Smith. Recent cultural and social changes in the United States have prompted concerned Christians to pick up their pens and address their respective flocks on the question of how to maintain...
Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago
There’s been quite a bit of controversy lately. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. The uproar surrounds a set of proposals regarding the state of American society and the character of the church in its midst. Let me give you some...
Progressives, Harry Potter, and Little Platoons
We’re pleased to publish this guest feature by Bart Gingerich. Why do progressives like Harry Potter? Ever since the election of Donald Trump, the left has been regularly referencing to JK Rowling’s popular books in order to rally the opposition...
Hamilton, Meritocracy, and Patriotism
I held out for as long as I could. My resistance was sustained chiefly by a stubborn contrarianism that resists as many trends as possible, particularly those that can be credibly connected to New York City, Washington, San Francisco, or Los...
Brexit and the Moral Vision of Nationhood
On the morning of June 24, Britain awoke to the devastation of a vast political and social earthquake, as, after an unpleasant and divisive campaign, a majority of our nation voted to leave the European Union (EU). The aftershocks and...
On the Quirky Author Bio
If you’ve spent any amount of time online then you have come across a weird genre of online writing that we’re going to call the Quirky Author Bio. You’ll find them at the end of blog posts all over the...