According to recent stats, religious affiliation is on the wane and autonomy is on the rise. Of course, these things are proportionally related, for as people increasingly adopt the dogma that above us is only sky, they begin to see themselves (either individually or collectively) as the ultimate source of authority. In such a world, […]
Christianity fell out of intellectual favor during the Enlightenment in large part because Rationalist and Empiricist critics charged it with being incompatible with all reason and evidence. At the time, sadly, the church as a whole did less than a stellar job of responding to such charges. But a funny thing happened on the way […]
Kirk Cameron is fearless. The actor, best known for his role as "Mike Seaver" on the sitcom Growing Pains, walked up to four tattooed street toughs and asked them if they had ever heard of the Ten Commandments! This isn't a scene from Cameron's recent Left Behind movies, it is part of a new evangelism […]
"Popular culture" is a slippery and deceptive term for a massive and unwieldy reality. As in other controversies, many arguments about popular culture are frustrating because there is no prior agreement on exactly what is being talked about. Sometimes "popular culture" is used to denote any cultural activity not produced and sanctioned by "elite" cultural […]
Central in late modern society, I previously claimed, is bonding over ideology. Especially in an age of social media, we are habituated to code persons as totems of a friendly or opposing force – an accuser or an affirmer. The gradual evaporation of traditional embodied networks of trust renders the center of human identity virtual […]
“What would Jesus do?” Though the bracelets were influential, the question is not without controversy. Two key debates deserve mention. First, Jesus has been many things to many people, and he calls for many things from them. Jesus would free the oppressed or have a quiet time or eat with the marginalized or wash people’s […]
“I wished people understood the realities of what life was like for a survivor. What it was like to try to bring justice. What it felt like whenever someone asked—or even insinuated—‘Why didn’t you report?’” Rachael Denhollander Last year my in-laws came to Canada for the summer, and we passed one humid evening watching Gone […]
Years ago, my sister took a class at Clemson University, a land grant college, called Animal Husbandry. Sustainable practices around breeding and calving, the term for cattle, and farrowing, the term for hogs, is an important focus of animal husbandry. My sister learned to distinguish various breeds of livestock and even sheared a sheep. She […]
The sight of heretics running rampant has always distressed the orthodox. Historically they’ve taken some extreme measures to restore their equanimity: wars of religion, the Spanish Inquisition, burnings at stakes, things like that. In America, so the story goes, with the advent of modernity, democracy, and the First Amendment, it was determined that religion was […]
Wendell Berry (1934- ) a native of Kentucky, lived in New York and California for several years, before returning to his homeland not only to write but to farm, which he has done for over thirty years. Berry has used his experience as a farmer to write insightfully about agriculture, economics, marriage and families, animal […]
This review column is subtitled, "Books Your Neighbors Are Reading," but I'm thinking it might need to be called–at least in this case–"Books Your Neighbors Should Be Reading." I doubt most people race to their newspaper on the day the Pulitzer Prizes are announced (and that goes for the Nobel Prizes as well–who do you […]
For those Lutherans of a generally traditionalist theological bent, it is an unfortunate fact of life in 2020 that perhaps the most prominent Lutheran in America today is none other than Nadia Bolz-Weber, who recently drew headlines when she unveiled a large sculpture of the female genitalia forged out of old purity rings. Unsurprisingly, Bolz-Weber’s […]