Picture this: Your wife of two decades has just filed for divorce. You’ve battled lifelong clinical depression. Your family is dysfunctional and impossible to talk to. You have no close friends to confide in. You’re on the edge of a crisis. Now, let us suppose, for our purposes, that you are not a churchgoing man. Let’s suppose that you don’t know how to act in church, you don’t know how to talk to church people, and you worry about feeling... Read more
School, work, and sheer laziness have conspired to keep me from updating this corner of the web as often as I should, meaning long-form commentary by moi on the news cycle’s blitzkrieg of Controversial Things has been unfortunately lacking. But recent takes on the case of Kyle Rittenhouse have brought me to a tipping point where I feel I ought to write something longer than a tweet thread about it. Some readers, including other Christians, might find my take offensive. Even... Read more
2020 continues not to disappoint, as Liberty University recently announced that Jerry Falwell, Jr. would be taking a “leave of absence” from the school. This announcement came in the wake of a now-famous photo where Falwell was comparing bare bellies with a woman not his wife, fly unzipped. His bizarrely slurred, disjointed radio call-in explanation thereof only made matters worse. Liberty gently took away his mike not long after. For many observers, this is not a shocking development. It was... Read more
Christian media has been abuzz in recent days over a three-way “conversation on race” including Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy, megachurch pastor Louie Giglio, and rapper Lecrae. If this seems like an… odd choice of panelists to throw together for this sort of conversation, you’re not alone in thinking this. But it certainly provided no shortage of fodder for hot takes, so much that it’s taken a couple of waves of reactions to dissect the whole hot mess. The first wave focused on... Read more
This week’s 6-3 SCOTUS ruling to make sexual minorities a protected class has come as a shock to many American conservatives. With a majority opinion penned by Neil Gorsuch, the ruling is a blatant legal retcon that would have Justice Scalia rolling over in his grave. As a piece of bench legislation, it will have damaging ramifications not only for Christians, but for anyone under pressure to accept the full suite of increasingly unhinged demands in the LGBT+ agenda. It’s... Read more
K-12 school closures around the country have inspired a plethora of memes and satire pieces about homeschooling. Whether parents were yay or nay before, every mom is a homeschooling mom now, for a few weeks at least. Fun, right? I’m a homeschool alumnus myself, but I can’t say I find the joke quite as funny as all that. It was funny the first time, but it’s starting to overstay its welcome. In the time of COVID-19, let me suggest that... Read more
The evangelical blogosphere has been buzzing with the latest sad tale of lost faith to come out of the evangelical “tribe”: popular YouTube comedy duo Rhett and Link, former youth leaders and committed believers who entertained many Christian and non-Christian listeners with their off-beat humor, dropped two new episodes of their podcast announcing that they no longer believed. (Watch Rhett’s here and Link’s here.) Christians like Matt Markins reacted with surprise and sadness, but also concern. Matt first heard about... Read more
Update: This post was written before our dialogue was released. You can now enjoy it on podcast here or YouTube below. The other week, I had the distinct pleasure of recording a radio dialogue with Justin Brierley and best-selling British author/journalist Douglas Murray for the Unbelievable? program. We were very fortunate to catch Douglas and pin him down, coming off one of his routinely long legs of travel (we last found him in Mexico, I think) and still juggling a... Read more
This year, I took it upon myself to make overdue first acquaintance with the poetry of W. H. Auden. Having had the wind knocked out of me by T. S. Eliot in high school, I anticipated a similar encounter with the at once very weird and very great. I was left disappointed on neither front (though I still find Eliot the greater poet). The epic Christmas prose-poetry oratorio “For the Time Being” stands out as perhaps the chief among Auden’s... Read more
For Christians mindful of the Church year, Advent is to Christmas as Lent is to Easter—a time which, while it need not be dominated by joyless solemnity, should properly have a touch of melancholy about it. As I look through the Advent hymns in my Anglican hymnal, separated from the Christmas hymns, I fear that their distinctive quality is lost in our haste towards Christmas. Chief among these is the hymn “O Very God Of Very God,” whose lyrics never... Read more
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