Culture Writing and the Great Forgetting

April 4, 2022 By John Ehrett

Matthew Walther, the decidedly curmudgeonly editor of the wonderful Catholic magazine The Lamp, is always worth reading—and his recent essay, “What Killed Cultural Aspiration,” is no exception. Amidst a cultural moment that tends to insist that video games are no less “art” than the paintings of Jasper Johns or Mark Rothko, Walther shamelessly celebrates the value of highbrow culture for its own sake. And yet Walther’s essay shouldn’t be read as an exercise in snobbishness, but as a defense of... Read more

Natural Law and the “Good Lives Model”

March 29, 2022 By John Ehrett

When I was working as a law clerk in the federal judiciary, I had the opportunity to tour FCI Seagoville, a low-security prison near the Dallas metro area. As I recall, one of the distinctives of the Seagoville facility was its emphasis on sex offender treatment—a topic I find particularly interesting given the various philosophical questions involved, such as whether and how desires as such can be changed. And as debates continue over Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s... Read more

Metamodernism and Masculinity

March 9, 2022 By John Ehrett

Last year, I published an article over at American Reformer that got a decent amount of buzz. In that piece, I critiqued a number of books—including historian Kristin Kobes du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, and sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s Taking Back America for God—that broadly purport to be “objective” and “academic” analyses of contemporary evangelicalism, while nonetheless embedding certain value judgments that have a distinctly theological significance. In other words, I argued there that what passes today... Read more

“Pan’s Labyrinth” and the Logic of Sacrifice

February 25, 2022 By John Ehrett

Last weekend, while I had the house to myself, I treated myself to the Criterion Collection Blu-ray of one of my favorite films of all time—Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. I was probably 16 or 17 when I watched it for the first time, and I was immediately entranced by its eerie ambiance and memorable conclusion. I’ve watched it almost every year or so since then, and honestly it still doesn’t get old. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the... Read more

Does “Kenogaia” Have a Happy Ending?

February 14, 2022 By John Ehrett

Eastern Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart is undoubtedly best known for his comprehensively metaphysical theology and his distinctive writing style. But I don’t expect that his recent novel Kenogaia—arriving as it does from a niche publisher, without an expensive promotional campaign—will get a lot of mainstream attention. And that’s a great shame, because it’s one of Hart’s finest works (not to mention a cracking good fantasy novel). On its face, Kenogaia begins like almost any other YA-influenced dystopian novel. Young... Read more

After “Faithful Presence”

February 3, 2022 By John Ehrett

Over the last few years, one of the most common phrases used to refer to Christian cultural engagement has been “faithful presence.” The term comes from sociologist James Davison Hunter’s 2010 book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility in the Late Modern World, which defines it somewhat impressionistically. Among other things, Hunter invokes the idea of “engagement in and with the world around us” and the requirement that “that Christians be fully present and committed to their... Read more

“The Secret History” as Cautionary Tale

January 27, 2022 By John Ehrett

Tara Isabella Burton, a novelist and social critic whom I always take time out of my day to read, has a fascinating essay up at Gawker about one of the strangest and most compelling novels I’ve read in the last few years: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Tartt is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning epic The Goldfinch—a sprawling meditation on beauty and meaning in the modern world, in the guise of an artworld thriller—but I’ve always thought that her... Read more

Rorty’s World

January 23, 2022 By John Ehrett

Not long ago, I was reading Michael Millerman’s excellent recent book Beginning with Heidegger, which chronicles various receptions of the controversial German thinker, and encountered a philosophical figure I hadn’t thought of in a long while: Richard Rorty. I first came across Rorty in the course of my high school worldview studies, where he was cited as an exemplar of “postmodernism.” To a certain extent, that characterization holds. As a thoroughgoing pragmatist, Rorty was explicitly antifoundationalist, rejecting any attempt to... Read more

James Bond and the Redemption of Masculinity

January 17, 2022 By John Ehrett

Like so many other longstanding fictional characters, James Bond has always been a man of his times, evolving with the mores and anxieties of the contemporary age. He might’ve gotten his start battling Communists, but certainly hasn’t stopped there. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Pierce Brosnan era pitted Bond against the enemies of a decidedly neoliberal culture—a magnate who manipulates the news (Tomorrow Never Dies), an ex-KGB agent turned terrorist (The World Is Not Enough), murderous North... Read more

Cultural Christianity and Theological Potemkinism

December 6, 2021 By John Ehrett

There’s a famous philosophical thought experiment, attributed to Robert Nozick, that presents the question of the “experience machine.” Imagine you are offered the opportunity to be placed permanently into a sensory-deprivation tank, where electrodes—capable of triggering an infinite range of thoughts and sensations—will be connected to your brain. All knowledge of the procedure will be purged from your memory, meaning that, for you, there will be no noticeable difference between true and simulated experiences. An infinite world of pleasure and... Read more