Benjamin J. Dueholm
How the apostles select Matthias (Easter 7B) (Acts 1:15-17, 21-26)
It’s an interesting contrast with the ways leadership and oversight have been handled since.
Eyes of the heart (Ascension) (Ephesians 1:15-23)
If we can be said to have them, we should at least want them to be opened.
What kind of justice did Derek Chauvin’s trial achieve?
The verdict of a court is not the final verdict of a society.
May 23, Pentecost B (Acts 2:1–21)
Maybe we should see Pentecost as a celebration of land and labor in which the Holy Spirt is made known.
May 16, Easter 7B (John 17:6–19)
Jesus’ high priestly prayer is a call to a new kind of knowing and loving.
May 13, Ascension (Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53)
What we see reminds us of what we miss, and vice versa.
Live not by a false sense of persecution
Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies is a damning testament to a religion without vision.
Why The Crown is so fascinating to a world in perpetual crisis
As the series drifts, it mimics the drift of the monarchy itself—and of other institutions.
What Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination doesn’t mean
Don’t bother looking for the political significance of the Supreme Court nominee’s Catholicism. There isn’t any.
The psychological wage of liberalism was laid bare at the DNC
If democracy is a moral abstraction instead of an embodied struggle, it won’t survive.
Stuck in an imperial system that has outlived its promise
Ross Douthat wonders what will get us beyond decadence.
What's wrong with cancel culture?
A suggested agenda for the signers of the open letter to Harper's on free speech
The coronavirus lockdown was doomed before the mass protests began
Its demise came from the same system that killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
The additional violence of George Floyd’s autopsy report
It’s getting harder to believe in the vindication of history.
Time waits for no one
I went to see the Rolling Stones play again—and revisited an adolescent fantasy.
Zora Neale Hurston brings us the voice of a former slave
Hurston's singular ear for the beauty of speech and memory brings Cudjo Lewis's story to life.
The talented Tara Isabella Burton
In Burton's debut novel, Louise and Lavinia represent the possibility that compulsive self-disclosure is a form of self-concealment.
Confessions of a (moderate) prude
I am finally old enough to admit something: the mysteries of adulthood, those "mature themes" we try to hide from the young, are mostly stupid.
The servant who perseveres (Isaiah 50:4-9a)
Isaiah’s suffering servant plays on our own ambivalent ideas about violence, passivity, and retribution.
What does a high priest do? (Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33)
A worshiper can go a long time without any idea of who Melchizedek is and what it means to be a priest according to his order.