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Why You Should Read Geez and First Things (Simultaneously)
Every once in a while, when I tire of reading the Internet (it never ends) and feel like spending money on paper publications that I will eventually throw away or lose, I go to my local newsstand and I...
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The Pope and Neil Postman Walk into a Bar
As an object lesson for the Introduction to Media Studies class that I teach, I selected a video news story at random from CNN.com a few weeks ago. I didn’t offer any context for the video besides that...
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I am a Christian in the 21st Century
Icon depicting the First Council of Nicaea. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) This week’s DOMA hearings have prompted the Evangelical blogbuddies to gird their loins and defend the ranks of the faithful few;...
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For the Billionth Time, Women Are Not Too Angry
Sometimes you realize you need to give a serious response to things that are wrong on the internet, and sometimes you realize all that needs to be said is: isn’t that the worst? I can summarize the...
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What’s the Point of Teaching Foreign Languages?
Ta-Nehisi Coates, amid his first trip to France after a couple of years of studying French, recently wondered what we expect when we teach foreign languages prior to college. Almost no one reaches a...
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The New Lost Cause
The marriage battle is over and everybody knows it, even Maggie Gallagher, even World, which nevertheless just dedicated part of a cover package to a small group of young evangelicals who have vowed to...
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No, Kathryn Joyce is Not Attacking Good Christian Parents
I was keenly interested in Kathryn Joyce’s The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, a book about the evangelical adoption trend and the industry it’s driving, from the...
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We Are Not That #BostonStrong
I am a Bostonian. I was born here, have lived here my whole life excepting a few excursions, and with those interludes behind me, I intend to stay here. Boston is my home. On Monday, April 15, Patriots...
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What Really Happens When People Lose Their Religion?
If you’re reading this blog, chances are you know someone who has de-converted from Christianity or lost their faith in some way. It’s also pretty likely that this person has cited science as a...
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Rap Battle: Christianity Today’s Hip-Hop Cover Story is a Contextless Disaster
I like Christianity Today. I’m a subscriber. I’ve also written for them — several times if you count Books and Culture. I have several friends and acquaintances who are current or former CT staffers....
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History, Atheism, Community: Posing a Question
Consider the brief “history” of atheism as outlined in a recent post by a member of an atheist group in Tucson, Arizona. Here history is construed as the presentation of facts across time; to tell the...
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Philosophical Flavors
The hardest thing about doing philosophy is certainly not reading books and thinking. By far the most difficult is understanding the fault lines that make up the world of professional philosophy and...
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The Men of Fox News are Right: My Breadwinner Wife is Destroying My Marriage...
I have no one to blame but myself. Eight years ago, when my wife and I were preparing to get married, we sat through several pre-marital counseling sessions with our friend and pastor, and we listened...
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Introducing the Confront-Your-Prejudices Book Club on G.K. Chesterton’s...
The Plan It’s begun to dawn on me, as life becomes more and more focused on books, how often we base our opinions on particular authors and their work on the faintest of impressions: one review, half a...
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Orthodoxy Book Club: Chapter 2, “The Maniac”
This is part of a series on G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Click here to read the introduction to the project. Page numbers refer to this free Kindle edition of the book. Other formats available for free...
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“Orthodoxy” Book Club, Chapter 3: “The Suicide of Thought”
This is part of a series on G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and is preceded by the introduction and Chapter 2. Note: Here’s a new free ebook version of Orthodoxy with an introduction by Matt Anderson,...
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The Strange Paradoxes of Conservative Self-Pity
This post by Eric Teetsel on “winning the marriage debate” has a lot of stuff going on that I think encapsulates some of the central paradoxes of American social conservatism in general, and American...
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Bottoms Up, Believers!
Image courtesy ChristianReader.com When I was growing up, it was pretty well understood that Christians — real, committed, Bible-believing, what today some would shorthand “evangelical,” Christians —...
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Good American Liberals vs. Violent European Radicals
If you’re an American man of letters of the sort that currently gets called upon by places like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books to diagnose European philosophers, you have a fairly...
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Be Employable, Get a Humanities Degree
This article has been republished a couple of places and makes a couple of good points about the value of philosophy for people who want to do journalism. It also has a strange holier-than-thou tone,...
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