There was a blizzard over Thanksgiving weekend this year. The snow fell throughout the day and by nightfall two feet of white covered the ground. Looking out, I saw amid the darkness clean, clear, pure white. The muck was obscured, the dirt invisible. All that I beheld was bright, driven snow; the light shining in […]
Friday, 17 December, 2021 by John Stovall
He is not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet. But Tim Chester is prescient. Little did he know that the Western church would enact the thought experiments which open his recent book, Truth We Can Touch: How Baptism and Communion Shape Our Lives. Congregations across the globe have performed these studies: what would […]
Monday, 22 June, 2020 by John Stovall
Michael Fisher is a muscular twenty-four year old man. As he sits down for the interview, he confesses that “this is probably the first time I’ve left the house without carrying a gun.” He’s been booked on assault charges, even though “I got jumped by two guys from New York…I had to make sure my […]
Wednesday, 19 February, 2020 by John Stovall
As I write these words, our British cousins have concluded their version of an election campaign. It took six weeks. A mere breeze of politics. But everything is bigger in America, so our electoral contests now seem never-ending, with no time to stop from 2016 to 2020. As those contests, so their lessons: never-ending books […]
Tuesday, 31 December, 2019 by John Stovall
They are the bane of every graduation speech, the baleful platitudes adorning 3rd grade posters since time immemorial: Dare to be Different! Dream Big. Be Original! Wharton professor Adam Grant’s book Originals tiptoes down the hall towards those elementary school placards. A peek at the table of contents suggests adult aphorisms for the MBA & […]
Tuesday, 26 February, 2019 by John Stovall
What are men good for? Biceps, brains, and simplicity. That’s the take from a recent article by Andrée Seu Peterson, where she responds to the recent outpouring of antagonism towards men in positions of power and more broadly throughout America, by enumerating all the things she appreciates about men. From one angle, Peterson is correct: […]
Monday, 17 December, 2018 by John Stovall
America is fractured. A divided land. America is distracted. A land of novelty. America is lonely. A home for none. We are a people given over to loneliness, obsessed with technological marvels, distracted by the same devices at which we marvel, and utterly divided on an array of economic, social, and political matters. This is […]
Tuesday, 20 November, 2018 by John Stovall
Even in her nonfiction, Marilynne Robinson cannot escape her passion for story-telling, so her latest collection of essays and lectures, What Are We Doing Here, features three reflections on the consequences of hyperpragmatism, the importance of history as an academic discipline, and the effects of ideology on thought. The opening tale winds its way through […]
Tuesday, 09 October, 2018 by John Stovall
The medieval historian Steven Runciman once quipped, “Of all the roads that a historian may tread none passes through more difficult country than that of a religious historian.” If he’s correct, then the controversial terrain of Greek reformer, writer, and eventual patriarch Cyril Lucaris (1570–1638) is a most treacherous bog for us to enter. Yet […]
Monday, 01 January, 2018 by John Stovall