Category: Anthropology
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...
Dignity Beyond Accomplishment
“The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to quantify, to classify, and to punish. It establishes over others a visibility through...
Book Review: The End of the Christian Life by J. Todd Billings
We live in a death-denying and death-defying culture. We know, on an intellectual level, that one day we will die, yet we tend to avoid contemplating this inescapable truth more than is strictly necessary. For modern people, death is an...
The Logic of the Body
Making ourselves vulnerable is dangerous. It’s dangerous because many of us have theological lenses that prohibit us from seeing those who are emotionally overwhelmed as deserving compassion. Too often we see their anxiety, depression, or anger as guilty until proven...
Tethered Still
I am a mother and a theologian. These two facts belong together, inextricable as they are for me and my experience of them. I was pregnant with my first child as I began my doctoral work; I carried her to...
The Tribe of Ishmael: Whiteness and Christian Identity
In 1889, an Indianapolis pastor named Oscar McCulloch gave a speech that empowered the development of eugenics in America. McCulloch had studied the Ishmaelites, a poor, white, extended family, and named his speech, “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in...
Star of the Sea
I have a weakness for verses about Mary and the sea. There is that line from Eliot, that bit of the Dry Salvages, when he asks the lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory to pray for all those who...
Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins
William T. Cavanaugh and Jamie K. A. Smith, eds.: Evolution and the Fall, Eerdmans, 2017. The questions the church confronts most severely at present are questions of human nature, and what to call good and what to reject as broken...
The Sexual Revolution Is Abortion
A few years ago I read an online exchange between two self-described Christians that has lingered with me as a good summary of our cultural moment. One of the speakers identified as bisexual, but also as a Christian, and was arguing...
God Become Man: Toward a Richer Theology of the Incarnation
For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality. —St....