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The holiday rush from Halloween to Thanksgiving and Christmas to New Year’s is on. Holiday retail spending this year is projected to surpass an astounding $1 trillion from November to January. It’s a time of year that evokes a range of emotions; from great excitement and joy, to the glib sentimentality of holiday cheer, to […]
However complicated the genealogy of modern morals might be, it seems a sad but unavoidable conclusion that all the nuances and subtleties of thousands of years of ethical reflection on the human condition have culminated in a morality that increasingly operates in terms of two simple categories: love, and its antithesis, hate. Front yards are […]
There is an incredible line in the second volume of The Lord of the Rings in which Bilbo describes his current emotional state to Gandalf the wise wizard: “I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” I am sure many […]
Questions of human identity are shaking societies to their very core. In her book Primal Screams, Mary Eberstadt explains how traditional answers to this question found in family, community, and faith identity have in large part disintegrated. She writes, “Every one of the assumptions [we] could take for granted is now negotiable. No wonder erotic […]
How do you love when you know it will break your heart? When my family started their 24-hour drive back to Wisconsin after dropping me off at college, my heart ached. I was in a foreign land. People didn’t dress the same. Their manner of doing business was different. The houses looked shabbier, and the […]
Last month, in my post about virtue ethics, I questioned whether the notion of rewards that will be distributed at the final judgment was necessary in order to emphasize the importance of Christian obedience. Instead, I suggested that our existence as God’s image bearers entails that we were made to reflect God’s goodness and indeed […]
“That’s me! That’s my life. I feel so empty,” my friend Julie said when I told her the title of the book I was working on. But her response to the title wasn’t unique. Whenever I told people what I was working on, the most common response was a knowing, low-pitched “Mmmm.” The reality of […]
As the first part of this post indicated, we cannot define the imagination as merely the faculty of pretending or making up the imaginary. This is for two reasons: first, such a definition shortchanges our ability to understand and employ the function of imagination within daily life, and secondly, as a result, it truncates our […]
Many teenagers know how to get what they want from their parents. After the initial polite request has failed, there comes the sour face, the tears, the heated exchange, the slamming of doors and possibly the threat of leaving home, never to be seen again! However, most parents know that they have to stand firm […]
Scientists disagree on its causes, treatment, and prevention. Government regulations seem slow and, in some cases, counter-productive. Truth is elusive, yet many claim to have it. I must be talking about Covid-19, right? Actually, no, I was talking about mental illness. There is a sense in which, when coronavirus first invaded our news channels, some […]
Most are well aware of Peter’s denying Jesus three times. We may even recall that Satan was involved in Peter’s debacle. As Jesus said before Peter’s failure and the other disciples’ abandonment, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your […]
A regular refrain we have heard over the past few weeks runs something like “there’s never been anything like this COVID-19 situation.” Sure, there have been pandemics, but none quite like this. Yet in some sense an event like this is simply another of what we call “calamities.” As the Oxfored English Dictionary defines it, […]
