Featured Essay / Culture
The video for "The Cost of Freedom" event is now available. Cornel West and Robert George joined Rick Warren at Biola University for a discussion about disagreement, common ground, and justice. West and George are good friends, yet disagree on important issues. There is a lively discussion about halfway through as…
Essay / Misc.
I have been on a relentless hunt for the perfect damask fabric to use in my bedroom. When my husband and I moved here from Washington, D.C. this past June, one of the first tasks we undertook was the careful placement of our furniture and
Essay / Misc.
I’ve just reviewed Amy Black’s utterly sane, entirely helpful Beyond Left and Right: Helping Christians Make Sense of American Politics over at The Other Journal. Check it, and this fun, provocative journal out here.
Essay / Culture
Citizens of the United States of America are quick to argue that they have constitutional rights – for everything. Citizens defend clearly expressed rights such as the right to free speech, the right to not be searched or seized unreasonably, and the right to peaceably
Essay / Misc.
In the few years that I have been an Anglican, I have met a number of people who identify themselves as Anglo-Catholics. What these particular Anglo-Catholics mean by this, of course, is that they are Anglicans who see themselves in unbroken communion with the “one,
Essay / Misc.
My colleague Joe Henderson has been in a cave writing a doctoral dissertation. But today, he poked his head out long enough to relay his hesitancy to hug. ‘I’m a handshaker, not a hugger,’ Joe tells me. He’s not alone. Fellow-blogger and colleague Fred Sanders
Essay / Misc.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the call to let others be. This, I take it, is the ethical correlate of the Christian doctrine of creation, in which the perfectly strong God makes room for the world, in which he lets it be.
Essay / Education
A few years ago, I taught the Chronicles of Narnia as part of a college course. I always feel odd teaching a class on books that people read for fun, books with a very high entertainment value. Isn’t that what people outside the academy assume
Essay / Misc.
Just the other night I was doing something that all middle-aged university professors do on a regular basis — maintaining my Facebook! Yes, I have a presence on Facebook and, yes, on occasion I visit the site to see what all of my “friends” are
Essay / Misc.
Victor Davis Hanson spoke twice at Biola University on October 8. His afternoon lecture was on one of his specialties, the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Reading Thucydides has been a standard assignment for students in the Torrey Honors Institute for a long
Essay / Culture
My favorite band, The Lost Dogs, just finished up a Route 66 road trip with a beach party concert in Santa Monica. It may not quite count as The American Dream, but winding from Chicago to L.A. on what is now the nostalgic back road
Essay / Literature
Like her biblical namesake, the Ruth of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) is a sojourner among strangers. The almost misleading title of the novel suggests that the novel will be concerned with the daily habits that constitute and stabilize domestic life. Instead, the novel’s protagonists inhabit
Essay / Misc.
The church is a visible reality. Sort of. Evangelicals frequently forget, neglect or disdain the notion of the church’s visibility. This is more often than not a function of an ecclesiological minimalism. We get antsy around institutions and formalities, and we rejoice in the simplicity