What makes a person or theological statement “individualistic”?

I wanted to put up a quick post to deal with an objection that had been raised to John Shelton’s post over on the main site. In his post, Shelton argued that there is a strong individualistic streak to American...

/ April 29, 2019

Is Burnout a Generational Issue or a Class Issue?

If you haven’t yet, please do read Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent Buzzfeed essay on millennials and burnout. My first reaction to the essay was to agree with nearly every word of it and pass it on to others. But after...

/ January 8, 2019

Three Notes on the Bulwark

The good folks over at The Weekly Standard deserve a ton of credit for their fast work in relaunching a new publication, The Bulwark, in the aftermath of their untimely shuttering last month. What follows will be mostly critical so I want...

/ January 7, 2019

A Quick Thought on “Sacramental” Language

Derek has a good post offering some needed pushback to the growing usage of ‘sacramental’ language amongst some evangelicals. The problem, in short, is that sacraments are a very particular thing with a particular function in the Christian life and...

/ January 2, 2019
old-books

Reading Plans in 2019

One of the things you will become aware of very quickly when you begin writing a book is that you know nothing. (The next phase is becoming aware of the fact that you are a fraud.)

/ December 31, 2018

He Saw Our Darkness

This piece on Johnny Cash is fantastic: The tragic, doleful Cash had returned. On his own compositions and covers, he sang of a cold-blooded killer haunted by his deeds, a convict known only by the number tattooed on his neck,...

/ September 24, 2018

Consent and Trust

From the NYT: For our first date, he took an Uber to my apartment through a winter storm. As the snow fell outside, we sat close on my couch while he talked touchingly about poetry. Two hours in, I was hoping...

/ September 21, 2018

Rosaria Butterfield and Evading the Issues

Jeremy Erickson: Rosaria Butterfield has not to my knowledge spoken recently about whether or not she continues to experience sexual temptation towards other women. People talk about her as a “former lesbian,” and as long as everything is defined in...

/ September 20, 2018

Football and the Political Act of Prayer

Paul Putz: Before the whistle blows for the first time this year and the football goes tumbling through the air, there will be an act dripping with political significance. It will come even before the singer takes the field and...

/ September 19, 2018
old-books

The Hedonism of Reading Good Books

E. J. Hutchinson at TAC: “I hate to read new books.” So begins William Hazlitt’s essay “On Reading Old Books.” The title will remind readers of C.S. Lewis’s similarly named but much more well known essay “On the Reading of...

/ September 18, 2018