In a Facebook conversation a while ago, somebody linked to this 2012 piece by Conor Friedersdorf listing 21 things that Americans sometimes mean by the word “conservatism.” It’s a helpful checklist for me, because I think of myself as a conservative more often than not, but often don’t fit other people’s definition of one. So here’s how I stack up against Friedersdorf’s list: An aversion to rapid change; a belief that tradition and prevailing social norms often contain within them... Read more

When I was in grad school, involved in the graduate chapter of InterVarsity at Duke, we spent a lot of our time worry about how Christians should respond to “postmodernism.” 20th-century evangelicalism had invested itself pretty heavily in a kind of Enlightenment rationalism, and in the 90s many evangelical intellectuals were realizing that it was time for a course correction. And Duke in the 90s was a center of postmodernism. You couldn’t walk down the corridor without hearing someone say... Read more

They say there was a secret chord That Leonard played, and it pleased the Lord, But you don’t really care for music, do you?Well, now that your election’s won,You can play your games and have your fun,While all the righteous sing their hallelujah. You saw her standing in the waves, A beckoning torch for broken slaves, You saw her, and you knew she saw right through you. So you tied the Lady to a chair, You pared her nails and... Read more

The following is an article that I wrote for Christianity Today online last year, which they decided not to publish. So I’m releasing it this year as a blog post. I didn’t get it out yesterday, but that’s probably appropriate, since it’s an argument for All Saints’ over “Reformation Day.” This article was probably my last attempt to speak as an evangelical Protestant to evangelical Protestants. I will always consider myself an evangelical, but having made the decision to “swim... Read more

The Wartburg, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wartburg_Eisenach_DSCN3512.jpg As anyone who knows me is aware, I’ve been engaged for more than twenty years now in discerning whether or not I should enter full communion with Rome (i.e., “become Catholic”). This journey began–well, it probably began with my parents and grandparents teaching me the Christian faith in infancy. Discovering G. K. Chesterton as a teenager made me begin to think of Catholicism as a live possibility. Phil Kenneson, one of my professors at Milligan College, told... Read more

Thomas Nast cartoon, public domain, https://www.catholicleague.org/thomas-nast-cartoons/ Apparently there is something called the “Al Smith dinner,” which is a “democratic institution” in danger from Donald Trump. I find this a bit ironic, since when Al Smith actually ran for president in 1928 plenty of people thought he was a danger to democratic institutions himself. He would take the Bible out of public schools: Indeed, his candidacy was nothing more than a papal plot to smash the public schools with a club called... Read more

In my ongoing effort to read through the Bible in Hebrew, I just finished Jeremiah 5. One of the things that struck me about it this time through was the contrast between God’s control over nature (v. 22) and God’s people’s ability to resist God (v. 23). God sets the sand as a boundary for the sea, and the waves of the sea can’t pass it however much they may rage, but “this people” does manage to “turn aside and... Read more

My latest Netflix DVD was a movie I’d seen years ago, Throne of Blood–Akira Kurosawa’s magnificent Japanese adaptation of Macbeth. A couple of things struck me this time around that I hadn’t remembered from last time. One was that in terms of plot and characterization Kurosawa’s version is, in some ways, an improvement on Shakespeare’s (yes, blasphemy, I know). In Shakespeare, we jump from the witches predicting that Macbeth will become the king to Macbeth already having discussed the murder... Read more

Rebecca Bratten Weiss adds her voice to the many condemning the maxim, “hate the sin, love the sinner.” I agree with the substance of what Rebecca is saying here, but I still can’t see how this means that “hate the sin, love the sinner” is a false maxim. Quite the reverse. She has a good point that labeling people as “sinners” (as if we aren’t sinners ourselves) is a problem, so we could rephrase it as “hate the sin, love... Read more

My friend Jonathan Huddleston (my most reliably acute critic) pointed out that I really didn’t do enough to substantiate the thesis in my last post. In particular, Jonathan asked why God couldn’t be the creator in the traditional, orthodox sense (the one who causes all things to be, including the processes of nature) while also “tinkering” (the term I used in my earlier post) by setting up particular structures in the way suggested by ID theorists. It’s a good caveat.... Read more