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Not long ago, I finished reading (with a sleeping baby on my lap) Catherine Pickstock’s excellent new book Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics. It is undoubtedly one of the most difficult—and yet profoundly stimulating—volumes I’ve read this year. I actually set it aside for a month or so between starting and finishing, wondering […]
Friday, 02 July, 2021 by John Ehrett
If you’ve ever found yourself straying into the distinctive online realm that is Weird Christian Twitter, sooner or later you’ll come to the conclusion that “Very Online” Lutherans are a pretty scarce bunch. It’s not hard to come across Catholics arguing over the possibility of distributism and the merits of Francisco Franco, “1689er” Reformed Baptists […]
Friday, 04 June, 2021 by John Ehrett
Over the last several years, I’ve developed a morbid sort of fascination with the phenomenon of humanities academics calling for the demise of their own disciplines. For one thing, it’s a curious inversion of Upton Sinclair’s aphorism that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not […]
Wednesday, 05 May, 2021 by John Ehrett
As a general rule, I try not to make a practice of writing about “wokeness” or “political correctness” controversies—the genre is burned-over ground, and much of the time these clashes are simply reducible to sheer polarization between the American left and right. Every so often, though, something distinctly theologically significant is at stake. While reading […]
Monday, 05 April, 2021 by John Ehrett
Over the last fifty years or so, the question of art and its relationship to mass culture has taken on increasing importance in Protestant circles. Historically, the best-known treatments of the subject have tended to focus on contrasting the glories of the classical tradition with the desiccated state of modern creativity. Most famously, Francis Schaeffer—with […]
Friday, 05 March, 2021 by John Ehrett
Early last year, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down cities and countries across the globe, I read Joseph Bottum’s book The Decline of the Novel, which contrasts the “chanson fiction” of the medieval Catholic imagination—which stressed the integrity of social roles, the accomplishment of duties, and the performance of civic scripts—with the “roman fiction” […]
Friday, 05 February, 2021 by John Ehrett
Predictably, the recent confirmation of Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett triggered a fresh round of divisive political messaging, as Democrats and Republicans alike sought to capitalize on the moment. But the perception of politics as a clash between two unified ideological fronts masks an important, if hidden, reality: throughout the broadly right-of-center legal world, […]
Wednesday, 02 December, 2020 by John Ehrett
As a general rule, the mainstream academic guilds are not kind to American evangelicalism—regularly charging evangelicals with defending an ahistorical “Christian Nationalism,” promoting anti-intellectualism, obstructing social progress, neutering Americans’ incipient class consciousness, and so on. And so you’d be forgiven for expecting that High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America—a recent sociological […]
Friday, 06 November, 2020 by John Ehrett
Jordan Cooper’s new book Prologomena: A Defense of the Scholastic Method is a welcome and long-overdue contribution to today’s confessional Lutheran theology. The first in a planned series of volumes entitled “A Contemporary Protestant Scholastic Theology,” Prologomena lays the necessary philosophical groundwork for the retrieval of a distinctly small-c catholic understanding of Lutheranism. Though Cooper […]
Wednesday, 07 October, 2020 by John Ehrett
With the obvious exceptions of Jesus Himself and the authors of the biblical texts, few figures in the Christian tradition have been subject to such divergent theological interpretations as Martin Luther. Might Luther have actually been the devil’s secret weapon? In his recent doorstopper America On Trial: A Defense of the Founding, Catholic author Robert […]
Wednesday, 02 September, 2020 by John Ehrett
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 […]
Tuesday, 04 August, 2020 by John Ehrett
Over the last few years, theologically conservative Christian intellectuals have pumped out a large number of books prophesying the decay of Western civilization and the large-scale collapse of American Christianity—Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Anthony Esolen’s Out of the Ashes, Charles Chaput’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Robert Cardinal Sarah’s The Day Is Now […]
Wednesday, 08 July, 2020 by John Ehrett
