What will you be for Halloween this year? Can one ask that in a Christian publication? It probably depends on your generation and geography, to be honest. I must confess a certain nostalgia for Halloween. Not the current Halloween that the New York Times recently termed a “mutation from humble holiday to retail monstrosity,” now...
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Midway through the book of Daniel, everything changes. Nice, well-ordered stories that have fed generations of Sunday School kids suddenly give way to seemingly bizarre visions with strange imagery and uncertain interpretation. Daniel 1–6 are incredibly helpful for us in that they model a kind of belief in God, a type of posture toward the...
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“The Devil laughs because God’s world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God’s world has meaning.” Milan Kundera watched the world of Central Europe fall under the weight of totalitarianism, over most of a century being crushed, first by the Nazis and then the Communists, with remarkably artful eyes...
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What makes a book “good”? Is only overtly Christian literature worthy of filling the Christian mind and attention? And if this is the case, why does it seem like the majority of Christian fiction is unbearably trite and shallow? For many, the difference between the stories admitted into the canon of “literature” and the popular...
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Love in the ruins—and to be honest, we don’t get better than that. One more window into this reality is the recent essay in the NY Times, “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled,” where we read that, surprise of all surprises, the AI search engine has a “personality” that longs to love,...
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This week I was in Stanford, Kentucky, the second oldest town in the state, taking part in the biannual gathering of the Wedgwood Circle. Most of 15 years ago a roomful of folks from throughout the United States, Boston to Los Angeles, came together to think though the meaning of vocation for the common good,...
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