Twas the year of New Yorker stories for me, I guess. While I dabbled in some other collections (Hemmingway, Alice Munro), here are the five stories that made a dent on my imagination this past year (all published in the New Yorker): 5. Lauren Groff, “Above and Below.” A rather minimalist tale of a Florida…
I don’t usually highlight my “professional” reading in these annual retrospectives, but this year I read three theology books that stood out in a unique way. These are books that I would be enthused to give to friends and colleagues. In particular, it struck me that these three books could be very profitably read by…
Looking back, 2011 was a difficult year for our family. But any year in which one can still read can’t be all bad. So as per my tradition (see, for example, 2009 and 2010), and as a way to cultivate gratitude, I’ll spend the next few posts reflecting on a year of reading. I’ll highlight…
A friend pointed me to this article on the “Mall-ification of America”–which dovetails with my analysis of the mall’s liturgies in Desiring the Kingdom, particularly highlighting the assimilation that happens when we naively adopt what we (wrongly) think are “neutral” forms. Consider these concluding paragraphs: There is some data to go on, though: According to…
When I give talks based on Desiring the Kingdom, I sometimes try to crystallize the philosophical anthropology at the heart of the book in this way: “If I really want to know who you are, I’m not going to ask what you know. I’m not even going to ask what you believe. If I really…
Every technology is attended by a mode of bodily practice. So even if the computer is primarily an information processor, it can never completely reduce us to just “thinking things” because it requires some mode of bodily interface: whether we’re hunched over a desk, glued to a screen; or looking downward at a smartphone, our…