Tag: COVID-19
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...
Prudence, Paranoia, and Loving Our Neighbor
“Will a surplus Russian gas mask protect me from coronavirus, or should I buy an actual respirator?” These are the questions we ponder on social media in the year of our Lord 2020. Three weeks into the United States’ experience...
Our Lives or Our Freedoms: The Fear of Tyranny in a Time of Pandemic
There’s a famous scene in the movie, Braveheart, a 1995 film that became something of a classic among embattled Christian conservatives who liked to see our own battle with “Big Government” in the romanticized terms of a Scottish epic. Riding...
Rise of the Scops: Wonder After the Pandemic
It was Virginia Woolf who wryly observed, “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”[1] I had no idea what this meant, until I stumbled into a fairy wood where a gilded volume by W.B. Yeats waited patiently for my...
The Church Speaks to the World: On Pope Francis’s Urbi et Orbi Blessing
Pope St. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris broke new ground with its greeting: It was the first encyclical addressed not just to the Church but to “all men of good will.” Thus, in the midst of his Second...