Category: Books
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...
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.”...
Gray on the Two Faces of Liberalism
So I first heard mention of John Gray on a recent episode of Rebuilders. Then I mentioned it in our writers’ Slack and found out that a few folks in there were already big fans of Gray’s work while another...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda (VI)
Here Kaunda is discussing military rule and why he sees it as a dead end for newly independent African nations. (Military rule mostly came in with the second generation of dictators, such as Idi Amin and Mobutu, and usually with...
You Mostly Shouldn’t Write About People You Hate
A thought provoked by Miles’s column at World in which he says: What made McCullough so different from his critics is that he maintained affection and charity towards the United States and its peoples despite its flawed history. McCullough had the...
Christopher Thompson on New Natural Law
Christopher Thompson, author of what looks to be a fascinating book on natural law and ecological care, on the failure of New Natural Law (this is an excerpt from the Friday Feature of Mars Hill Audio, which you need to...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda IV
The whole chapter on nationalism is fascinating reading, especially if the main forms of nationalism you’re familiar with are European forms or the muddled thing we have here in America. African nationalism, this explosive force which has changed the shape...
Book Recommendation: Aggressively Happy by Joy Marie Clarkson
Joy has written the book that I wish had existed when I was in college so my college pastor or church pastor could have given it to me and saved us all a lot of time and expense on coffeeshops and...
Dawson on the Other-Worldliness of Christianity
Dawson: But though the religion of that age was intensely other-worldly, its other-worldliness had a very different character from much that we have come to associate with the word in its modern pietist form. It was collective rather than individualist,...