Month: August 2022
Perspective
Some real talk: On a typical Sunday here in Lincoln, I would bet good money that there are more folks in PCA churches than there are PC(USA). 20 years ago, that would have been insane—but thanks to God’s kindness to...
Reading “Non-Anxious Presence” (II)
Before getting into more prescriptive analysis in his later chapters, Sayers spends the first chapter developing his concept of a “gray zone.” To begin, The pandemic, cultural change, political polarization, and technological disruption have rapidly altered the world we live...
New Coalitions
Though it is common now, and quite understandable, to lament the relationships and institutions that have been changed and broken over the past seven years, I also think it’s worth keeping our eyes open to the relationships and coalitions being...
Two Bad Reasons to Oppose Loan Debt Forgiveness and Two Better Ones
Briefly: Bad Objections 1. “I paid all my debt back and it isn’t fair that other people shouldn’t have to do the same.” In interests of disclosure, I have already paid off about 95% of my student loan debt and...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Julian Nyerere (I)
I’ve finished Kaunda. Now on to Nyerere, a contemporary of Kaunda’s who was the first president of Tanzania, serving from 1964 to 1985. I’m reading his book Socialism, which is a collection of addresses and papers he wrote in the early...
On Mr. Berry and Professor Jennings
In his critique of my discussion of “whiteness” in the book, my friend Scott Pryor observes that it seems as if I’m shifting away from Wendell Berry’s critique of modernity and toward Willie James Jennings’s. On one hand, in Chapter...
Gray on Modernism
From Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern: Western societies are governed by the belief that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign. As societies become more modern, so they become more alike. At the...
To Die on the Right Side
Ward, from After Humanity: Lewis thus ardently defends the Tao not so much because it told him how to live, still less because it entitled him to tell other people how to live, but because it told him how to view...
Places of Refuge are Places of Discipleship
Here is one of the arguments some friends have made in defending the evangelical hard pivot toward Trump and right-wing politics more generally: The country is changing. No one will be friendly to all of our beliefs or values. However, if...
Reading Mark Sayers’s “A Non-Anxious Presence”
That we live in a time of uncertainty and unique challenge is at this point widely accepted, I think. Call it the “negative age” if you like, or an ecclesial winter, or, better still in my view, a “gray zone.”...