Mere musings on culture, life, and theology by Samuel James
Samuel James on January 29, 2018 The Amazon Top 20 nonfiction lists includes two bestsellers, both from HarperOne, that include the f-word in their title and on their covers. A single asterisk keeps both titles from their honest spellings. My memory will not win any awards, but I simply do not recall ever seeing a trade book in Barnes and Noble…
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Samuel James on January 29, 2018 I think it's past time to admit that the hostility we see from college students toward speech and ideas they dislike is a generational issue. I know this sounds like I'm encouraging stereotypes of millennials, and reasonable people are not supposed to talk about any group in that kind of systemic language (well, almost any…
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Samuel James on January 25, 2018 Rod Dreher, a writer for whom I have a lot of admiration and respect, nevertheless has a tendency to overstate things, especially when those things pertain to his lived experience. Likewise, he has an unfortunate tendency to assume the worst intentions of people who push back against the conclusions he draws from his experiences. Those…
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Samuel James on January 19, 2018 I have a piece up at First Things today on the sexual revolution, #MeToo, and why women are always the biggest losers in a sexually autonomous society. Here's an excerpt: The two most consequential gains of the sexual revolution in my lifetime have been birth control and pornography, both of which have radically shaped the…
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Samuel James on January 16, 2018 -Sneering dismissal of an author is acceptable to the degree that his book likewise is sneering and dismissive. What works marvelously well in a review of Richard Dawkins doesn't in a review of Mitch Albom. You might have the same opinion of both writers, and that's fine! But responding to Mitch Albom as if he's…
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Samuel James on January 11, 2018 Netflix has recently added both The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II to its streaming library. Below is something I wrote in 2014 on what makes Part II so great. “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Michael Corleone is not lying when he says these words in The Godfather. He means them. He means them so…
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Samuel James on January 8, 2018 I have only a brief thought on Matt Loftus's recent essay (and follow-up blog post) on whether we should use the term "pro-life" to refer to issues other than the traditional referents. It seems to me that you can't make the term "pro-life" do more by making it mean less. I think that's what Matt…
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Samuel James on January 2, 2018 When I was in Bible college, few things received scorn as unanimously and frequently as the self-help genre. The corner of your local bookstore dominated by big, bright covers and names like Oprah and Tony Robbins was, almost all of us young, restless, Reformed pre-seminarians agreed, poison. We understood that the self-help genre was a…
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