A passage from Plato’s Apology that never fails to move me, after Socrates has been sentenced to death: “This much I ask from them: when my sons grow up, avenge yourselves by causing them the same kind of grief that I caused you, if you think they care for money or anything else more than they…
In the spirit of pretending this blog is a Tumblr, here’s a rich snippet that is the fulcrum of Ross Douthat’s long essay, “Social Liberalism as Class Warfare“: [I]s it just a coincidence that this self-interested elite holds the nearly-uniformly liberal views on social issues that it does? Is it just random that the one idea binding the post-1970s…
I generally don’t respond to book reviews or articles about my work. I especially don’t respond to those reviews that seem the most critical because, in my experience, they’re also usually not worth responding to (and often amount to some form of “I hold X; Smith holds Y; ergo, Smith is wrong” Uh, nope!). In…
I so enjoyed Alan Jacob’s review of his year in writing that I got thinking back over my own 2013 in terms of publishing. Books The second volume of my Cultural Liturgies project appeared as Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. I continue to be grateful for its reception, especially since it asks people to…
I won’t even attempt to rank the books I’ve read over the past year, or pretend to any kind of comprehensive, retrospective evaluation. (You can get a glimpse of my year in reading over at GoodReads). Instead, a few impressionistic notes about some favorites and standouts. First, though I wouldn’t have anticipated it, 2013 turned out…
Over at the Cardus Daily, I’ve posted some thoughts-from-the-hip on the status of the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection in light of the city’s bankruptcy proceedings. Here’s a teaser: “Detroit” is more than its finances (or lack thereof) because cities are more than economic entities. Cities are multifaceted organizations of human social life. There is…