Tag: COVID-19
Economics Turn Homeward
COVID-19 uncertainties provide a cultural moment for re-evaluating what really constitutes the good life. While the mandatory homecoming of sorts drags on, it sheds fresh and favorable light on home economies of simplicity and some measure of self-sufficiency. Stay-at-home orders...
The Cross Amidst a Plague: Choosing Cruciformity Over Self-Interest
In the weeks leading to Easter, Americans found themselves, religious or not, on an enforced fast from normal life. The liturgical feelings associated with Lent became the daily realities of uneasiness, mourning, fear. There are the real personal fears, the...
The Politics of Mask-Wearing
As many parts of our country move away from lock-downs and Americans begin to go about our business, the question of whether to mask or not has moved nearer to the center of our national consciousness. While it might seem...
The Populists and the Pandemic
Recently the world commemorated VE day, celebrating the vast global effort to defeat fascism, an inhuman ideology which sacrificed life on the altar of materialism. The Queen gave a speech to her quarantined subjects: declaring that ‘our streets are not...
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...
The Case for Donating Your Stimulus Check
During a pandemic, it always feels dark. Many future unknowns await us. But we can learn from an unknown Jewish prisoner who penned this line in a poem he wrote within his concentration camp cell.
What the Coronavirus Reveals: An Invitation to American Evangelicals Who Have Been Quoting that C.S. Lewis Essay
The argument of this essay is simple. I want to invite Christians, particularly American evangelicals, to a new consideration of how the coronavirus might cause them to rethink what kind of healthcare policy ought to mark a flourishing society. I...
An Individual Paradise is Not Enough: How Our Contagious World Aches for A Cosmic Hope
Our world feels contaminated with disease. And yet, precisely in light of this contagion, perhaps we can learn more about the breadth and depth of Christian resurrection hope. Indeed, our cultural imagination may be more in tune to a reality...
How Not to Talk About Pastoral Ministry During a Plague
I’m generally not one to complain about tone when assessing a book or article; I don’t love the foray into hopeless subjectivity that such a move (to me, anyhow) usually represents. But there are times when tone matters and you...
Moral Realism, Public Health, and Truth-telling Amid COVID-19
As the lockdown proceeds with no official end date in sight, we must turn our attention to a new reality confronting us: It is impossible to proceed with a lockdown to prevent COVID-19 deaths without other harms resulting. This was...