Category: Uncategorized

Danger and Play and Proverbs 31

There’s been, I’m sorry to say, Discourse. So I figured I’d make things a little worse by highlighting an aspect of a thing that I wrote a couple years back for the Calvinist International (may it rise again). What do...

/ August 6, 2022

From Whom All Fatherhood On Earth Takes Its Name

Τούτου χάριν κάμπτω τὰ γόνατά μου πρὸς τὸν Πατέρα, τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ, ἐξ οὗ πᾶσα πατριὰ ἐν οὐρανοῖς καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς ὀνομάζεται… Here, in Ephesians, Paul talks about the Patera, the Father, from whom pasa patria, all fatherhood/every...

/ June 19, 2022

Cultural Conversion, Thirteenth Century England Style; or, James Davison Hunter Vindicated by Sir Maurice Powicke

Norman Cantor (bitter, brilliant, blinkered; he was wrong about Lewis and so I don’t necessarily trust him to be right about others) writes that according to Sir Maurice Powicke, the key transformations of the thirteenth century “were not political and...

/ June 17, 2022

On History Not Ending

It’s a cute and annoying title because of course it’s a reference to Fukuyama, but I didn’t even realize that until I typed it. What I was referring to is what has been haunting me (and probably you) for the...

/ March 10, 2022

Scott Alexander, the Hitpiece, and the Limits of Inquiry

In certain moods I think that one of the greatest current social fights is the fight against the Grey Tribe ascendency, against the let’s-regard-humans-and-society-as-an-amoral-optimization-experiment approach to life. There are certain versions of this that are at the center of the...

/ February 13, 2021

Attention: a Breaking Ground Newsletter

This is the text of this week’s Breaking Ground newsletter. To view the website, and to sign up for the newsletter, go here.  If, in January, we thought that we had transcended the limits of our physicality, we know better...

/ August 10, 2020

TONIGHT: 7:30 EDT: Hauerwas, Danticat, Christman, and a New Cocktail!

Good afternoon! Tonight, join Stanley Hauerwas, Edwidge Danticat, and Phil Christman for the launch of Plough Quarterly’s special “Regeneration” issue, focusing on COVID and what lies ahead. Hosted by KGB Red Room on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, this event is...

/ May 16, 2020

The King of Social Distancing, c. 1665

In what will be surely the first of too many posts consisting of excerpts from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, I would like to introduce you to an unnamed man who is an example to all of us...

/ March 17, 2020

The Political Theology of Brunch: a Post in Honor of the Season

Among the many reasons for my affection for the 16th c. German political philosopher and jurist Johannes Althusius is this: He gets specific, to a degree that may be fanciful but is endlessly fascinating, about the commonality between different levels of political...

/ December 23, 2019

Stephen Miller and the Abolition of the Human

To the surprise of precisely no one, Stephen Miller has been exposed as a white nationalist– I mean, obviously, but there’s more that’s concrete now. The SPLC released a report, based on emails turned over to them by former Breitbart...

/ November 13, 2019