Category: Theology and Practice
Good Friday
Every year on Good Friday as a rule we go dark with regards to publishing new essays or reviews. Instead, we share a few songs to help people mark Good Friday. I pray that today will be a somber one...

“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...

How “Isolation” Helps Us Understand Sin
Loneliness and even estrangement we are familiar with, but isolation? Is this too strong a term to describe the ways in which sin afflicts our common life? The skepticism of this nomenclature, I think, is twofold. First, it may come...

Death and New Life on Holy Saturday
In the center of the photograph, an injured young woman lies on a stretcher. Her face is dusted in ash. Her left hand cradles her pregnant stomach. Men armed with rifles and wearing bulletproof vests carry her through the smoldering...

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...

In Defense of the Gender Binary
We are now seeing seismic shifts in perception about sex, gender, and marriage. You might think this has been occurring for some time now, and you wouldn’t be wrong about that. But, granting that as truth, the shift seems especially...

An Orthodox Theory of Brainworms
Commentators have been calling political extremism a form of religion for a long time. Discussions of the United States’s current political hysteria often describe it as similar to Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, or through Western heuristics. It is...

Biblical or Institutional?: On Navigating Hard Church Decisions
“It’s 2022, the Bible says nothing about (Insert church action) how on earth are they still (Doing/not doing) that!” If you have spent any amount of time in a local church, you have likely heard this or some similar sentiment...

The Mystery of Being Human in a Dehumanizing World
In the summer of 2021 I began driving an ice cream truck. My small contribution to Howdy Homemade Ice Cream, an ice cream shop that deliberately employs workers with intellectual, emotional, and/or physical disabilities, such as Down Syndrome, was to...