“Why do you wear a guillotine around you neck?,” someone asked me. Just recently, a student gave me a guillotine pendant after we finished reading A Tale of Two Cities. I now wear it, openly, around my neck, certainly not as an endorsement of revolutionary violence, but as a reminder and a provocation to genuine reflection. In A Tale of Two Cities, the guillotine is never just a machine. It is an idea. A promise. A hope. And Dickens insists... Read more
One of the great confusions of modern Western culture is that we’ve learned to use the words individual and individualism as if they were interchangeable. They are not. They name radically different visions of what a human being is. This confusion runs so deep that many Christians feel forced into a false choice: either you resist “individualism” and risk crushing the person, or you celebrate individuality and slide into expressive autonomy. However, that is a false dilemma. The biblical vision... Read more
Some books wear their theology on the surface. Others do not say much about God directly, yet they force us to ask theological questions because they strip life down to the bone. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is that kind of book. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short novel is set in a Soviet labor camp under Stalin. It follows one ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, through one ordinary day. There is no dramatic escape. No heroic revolt. No stirring... Read more
A strange thing happened in one of my classes recently. It was one of those moments that teachers live for, not because it was tidy, but because it was revealing. We were talking about how people decide what to believe, especially when looking for what’s true online. How Do You Know What’s True? I started with a simple observation: nobody evaluates every claim from scratch. We all rely on authority of some kind. We trust doctors about medicine, historians about... Read more
What exactly is atonement? Despite its importance, this question receives oversimplified answers that miss the biblical text’s own logic. Read more
What if pleasure is associated with dopamine and joy with oxytocin? How might that help us understand our pursuit of happiness? Read more
We're in a quiet crisis in education, and it's not primarily a technological one. It's a crisis of fear, especially of AI Read more
Few figures in literature express a more striking theology of repentance and responsibility than Elder Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov (a novel I finally read this past year). His view of guilt will stretch even the most law-oriented Westerners. Among his more arresting claims is this: “There is only one thing, one truth: to go and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins.” For many readers, especially those shaped by a Western, Protestant framework, this sounds excessive—if not outright heretical.... Read more
In a recent conversation, someone in our group posed the question, “Is it rational to have cultural or ethnic pride? If we didn’t accomplish anything our ethnic group did in the past, and we’re just products of our parents’ biology, is it actually rational to feel ethnic pride?” For some, this seems like a nonsensical question, especially in a day when ethnicity and culture (for many people) have become idols in themselves. But it’s a fair question, one that cuts... Read more
Mary’s Magnificat bursts with themes of honor and shame that resonate deeply with the cultural world of first-century Palestine Read more
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