Category: Social Trends
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
Getting historical perspective on a contemporary topic of debate is always helpful. Dr. Christopher Cleveland’s essay for us on the trinitarian controversy last summer is exceptional precisely because of how successfully he tied the current debate to historical debates and...
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
Note from Jake: This is an Alastair piece so it’s both extremely long and extremely rewarding to those who will read the whole thing. That said, today may be a good day to avail yourself of that green “print-friendly version”...
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...
Monasteries, Protestantism, and the Joy of Indifference
Recently a Catholic friend who has frequently visited a monastery for much of his adult life asked me about how Protestants can create stable communities that will preserve and pass on the Christian faith without monasteries. For many Catholics, he...
Walt Whitman on Neighbors and Strangers
It is good to remember, especially in light of these presidential primaries, that no era is without its share of baffling endorsements. Andrew Carnegie, whose imperious steel mills did more than perhaps anyone to antagonize the neo-transcendentalist folklore of Leaves...
On Prayer Shaming
If you grew up evangelical, or at least in the fundamentalist brand of evangelicalism I grew up in, one of the things you learned about prayer is that it isn’t gossip if you tell a compromising story about another person...