Last year, in the Christian Scholar’s Review, I published a review essay looking at Christian Smith’s What is a Person? alongside David Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence. This was commissioned as an opportunity to compare and contrast discussions in the social sciences regarding the nature of the human person with a robust theological anthropology. I’ve uploaded a…
One doesn’t need to read Fors Clavigera very long to notice my (increasingly less grudging) appreciation of David Brooks. And his column today, “If It Feels Right…,” pretty much covers my reading list over the last three years: Christian Smith, Charles Taylor, James Davison Hunter, and others. Today Brooks focuses on the disheartening picture that…
Friedman and Mandelbaum’s That Used to be Us seems to be a cautionary tale about America’s diminished future (sort of like Super Sad True Love Story without the laughs?). But I found the closing of David Frum’s New York Times review to be intriguing. Having already noted a tone of ambivalence in the book–talking about…
The project outlined in Desiring the Kingdom has a tenuous relationship to romanticism. On the one hand, while I accord a central role to the imagination, I spend time trying to emphasize that this is not the “inventive” imagination of the romantics; instead it is a receptive, constituting imagination–a mode of intentionality on a different…
Last night I was dabbling in The Graywolf Silver Anthology and hit upon a selection of poems from Jane Kenyon. I was immeasurably moved by “Notes from the Other Side,” in no small part because our congregation has been grieving and mourning alongside a family who are, unbelievably, unspeakably, journeying with their 21-year-old daughter through…
Chris Gehrz, associate professor of history at Bethel University, articulates a fair and helpful critique of my use of the word “pietism” in Desiring the Kingdom and related discussions. As I’ve noted elsewhere (and Gehrz recognizes), “pietism” is a particularly loaded, shorthand term in Reformed conversations. But that narrow use of the term does an…