Living Christianly in the Face of Political Change

Last updated on: December 11, 2020 at 9:56 am By John Ehrett

As a rule, I spend more than enough time on this site challenging expressions of political theology that, in some way or another, strike me as missing the mark. That’s because, in surveying the contemporary field of political thought, I find myself theologically and intellectually dissatisfied with the range of “ideological” options on offer. Liberalism, such as it is, paradoxically forfeits the happiness that comes from living within bounded limits, in the pursuit of an always-deferred exultation in the elimination... Read more

The Best Books I Read This Year (2020 Edition)

Last updated on: December 6, 2020 at 2:34 pm By John Ehrett

And so another year—a year unlike any other in recent memory—draws to a close. Happily, I did better on the reading front than last year: right now, it’s looking like I’ll finish up around at around 250 books, substantially up from 2019’s 170. (Maybe lockdown did have its upsides, after all!) Pretty sure next year, though, is going to focus on quality over quantity: Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter... Read more

Two Types of Integralism

Last updated on: December 2, 2020 at 6:28 am By John Ehrett

I’ve written a lot about integralism on this site over the last few years (and elsewhere), primarily because I think the questions integralists ask are compelling ones for any Christians engaged in public life. The central topic that today’s integralists write about—how should the state relate to the church?—is a matter of persistent importance, especially at a time of widespread social fragmentation and increasing tension between secular progressive views and the claims of traditional faiths. And there’s a real temptation... Read more

What If “Intellectual Diversity” Is the Wrong Higher-Ed Slogan?

Last updated on: November 24, 2020 at 12:21 pm By John Ehrett

Conflict on university campuses certainly isn’t anything new, as far as American history goes, though it’s certainly taken on increased intensity and significance in recent years. As many have already put it, what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus anymore: society as a whole confronts once-theoretical arguments over the nature of power relations in history and over the assumptions underlying intellectual inquiry as such. This, in turn, has given rise to a cottage industry on the right of pointing... Read more

Why You Probably Hate Most Movie, Book, and Video Game Reviews These Days

Last updated on: November 19, 2020 at 12:53 pm By John Ehrett

Earlier this week, I wrote about seeing Ron Howard’s new adaptation of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. And ever since then, I’ve been thinking about how disappointing it is that an otherwise well-made movie—with a number of interesting things to say about contemporary American life—is almost certainly going to be dismissed out of hand by a large faction of the modern pop-culture commentariat, for whom even the mention of the source material is a kind of political faux pas. In the... Read more

When “Integration from Within” Doesn’t Work

Last updated on: November 12, 2020 at 2:40 pm By John Ehrett

Given the pace of the 2020 news cycle—and, well, the fact of the presidential election—you’d be forgiven for missing a rather important news item out of Poland: the colossal wave of recent protests stemming from a court decision prohibiting the abortion of children with birth defects. To grasp the issue properly, a bit of background is in order. In 1993, shortly following the fall of the Iron Curtain, the heavily Catholic Poland shifted away from the expansive abortion regime guaranteed... Read more

Learning from the Confucian Tradition

Last updated on: November 2, 2020 at 9:14 am By John Ehrett

Last month, while leafing through the pages of the latest issue of Modern Reformation—a publication to which I periodically contribute—I came across an interesting piece entitled “Why You Should Not Buy Into Confucianism” by a former professor of mine, the esteemed Lutheran scholar and lawyer John Warwick Montgomery. In essence, Montgomery sets out to “illustrate the gulf separating Confucianism and biblical religion by way of several Chinese word studies”—the Tao, rén (benevolence), li (righteousness), ān (tranquility), ci (benevolence), and zhōng (loyalty). These concepts as used... Read more

Doomscrolling and the Sin of Curiositas

Last updated on: October 26, 2020 at 9:23 am By John Ehrett

Among all theological concepts, one I find particularly difficult to get my head around is what St. Thomas Aquinas called the “vice of curiosity,” or curiositas. Aquinas exposits the concept in detail, explaining that “there may be sin by reason of the appetite or study directed to the learning of truth being itself inordinate.” But at least to my mind, some of Aquinas’s more precise formulations of this sin—“when a man desires to know the truth about creatures, without referring... Read more

The Clash of Traditions in “The Nightmare Before Christmas”

Last updated on: October 21, 2020 at 1:52 pm By John Ehrett

A few days ago, my wife and I dropped by our mostly-empty neighborhood movie theater to take in Tim Burton’s bizarre little ‘90s flick, The Nightmare Before Christmas. (Sure, it’s also on Disney+, but if you have a month-to-month AMC membership, might as well go for the big screen!) If you’ve never seen the movie, it’s worth noting that no one can accuse Nightmare of unoriginality. (I, for one, can’t think of another gothic stop-motion musical mashup that cribs heavily... Read more

The Intellect as Vale of Tears

Last updated on: October 14, 2020 at 7:22 am By John Ehrett

Last week, I read one of the most arresting pieces of writing I’ve come across this year—Joseph Keegin’s new essay at The Point, “Wisdom That Is Woe.” In fact, the piece is so challenging that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Keegin’s essay is a response of sorts to Zena Hitz’s recent book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, which happens to be one of the most interesting volumes I’ve read this... Read more