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.”...
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...
Boromir
To briefly say a bit more about this: "Evangelicalism" as a Movement of Boromirs: each faction in the movement trying to wield a ring of power in its own way, thereby using worldly means to supposedly obtain heavenly goods. Or,...
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...
The Dead Consensus vs Ahmarism in Three Sentences
The Dead Consensus has no theory of power. The Ahmarists have no theory of martyrdom. A Christian political philosophy has to have both if it is going to be actually Christian.