Featured Essay / Culture
A friend and I had a conversation about a situation of systemic and personal abuse she was suffering, which turned into correspondence between us. With permission, I have polished up my exchange with Lori (a pseudonym), as a reflection on what it means for a victim to properly love a…
Essay / Culture
This article contains spoilers for Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012). How far would you go to protect those closest to you, the things you hold most dear? The tiresome rhetoric of Hollywood is very often to go “as far as it takes”, but Rian Johnson’s new film Looper
Essay / Culture
Here’s a diagram (click through it to view a larger version) that the founders of Biola kept close at hand when they needed to explain the variety of activities the early Bible Institute was engaged in. It’s a scratchy copy, and the graphic design isn’t
Essay / Culture
As you certainly know, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, recently died. Unfortunately, Ride died at too young an age (61) from pancreatic cancer. In the days that followed, there was news coverage of her passing and obituaries extolling her intellectual chops, her
Essay / Culture
I stood in church and watched two baptisms on the first day of 2012. Just a few hours before, a couple of friends and I had raised glasses and toasted the new year. Then, there in the sanctuary, two heads were lowered and splashed in that old reenactment of Christ’s new life.
Essay / Culture
For many, the famous English carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is lost on them. This became clear to me one rather cold evening on January 2 of last year, when I was at the checkout stand at a CVS drug store. After I made
Essay / Art
Does it make sense to thank someone for something they may have disowned? A lot has happened since Frank Schaeffer published Addicted to Mediocrity thirty years ago. He was going by the more diminutive “Franky” then, signifying, maybe, how staunchly he stood in his dad’s
Essay / Culture
Here’s a 656-page grand tour of some of the greatest moments in Western civilization: The Great Books Reader, edited by John Mark Reynolds. I highly recommend it. Then again, since I contributed to it, work with or for many of the contributors, and already like
Essay / Culture
The new project called Theological Engagement with California Culture is moving out of the initial planning phase and onto the public stage this November. Since the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society is in California this year, we are holding our first major presentation
Essay / Art
Everyone has his or her notion of what constitutes a relaxing evening. For me, among other things, it is an occasional trip to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles to watch and experience an operatic performance. This weekend, neither time nor finances permitted such
Essay / Culture
Mr. Coulombe’s latest offering on Taki’s Magazine takes as its starting point the recent bill signed into law by our “undead” governor and moves on to explore a more fundamental issue about illegal immigration: the culture of “self-indulgence and sloth” espoused by the Anglo elite.
Essay / Culture
It has been one month since the passing of one of my greatest heroes of the twentieth century. I heard of his passing from my friend Charles Coulombe when I rang him that day, July 4. Both of us agreed that he had been a
Essay / Culture
The final movie of the Harry Potter series is mundane where it should be magical, and magical when it should be mundane. (SPOILERS BELOW!) When you look back to the early Harry Potter movies, it’s hard to remember in this last that you’re in the