The politics of cutting people off
Political breakups aren’t some new low in American life. They’re an understandable response to stakes that have always been life and death.
An agnostic who out-Christianed the Christians
The 19th-century orator Robert Ingersoll denied God. But his answer to the question of human purpose strikes me as a pretty good one.
Other people’s greatness
I want to be like David Lynch. And my pastor. And my wife. But there aren’t enough hours in the day.
The Trump era makes me miss wokeness
I didn’t think this would happen so soon.
A better prayer for prisons
I love the Book of Common Prayer. I have some problems with Prayer #37.
The poverty of gossip
It’s not just that it’s sadistic. It also lacks aesthetic or psychological imagination.
Abolish ICE, and don’t stop there
Law enforcement officers generally resist any attempt to bring them to heel, and they are usually successful.
More thoughts on private morality
I’m back with another column, and I’m still being a killjoy.
The case for being a killjoy
We may be reluctant to say anything that sounds puritanical. But our private morality really does matter.
Reviled for Jesus’ sake
One of the clearest ways God says yes to Christians is when unjust authorities hate us.
In praise of unruly children in church
Sometimes they’re the only sign of life amid our solemn boringness.
Please, tell me what it says in the original Greek
Why are clergy so embarrassed to know things their job requires them to know?
Marilynne Robinson’s new Gilead novel makes Jack Boughton make sense
Everything in Jack is a marvel.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s history of the manly godly man
How American evangelicalism baptized male aggression
The deep roots of America’s enchantment with capitalism
Eugene McCarraher explains how money became our object of worship.
Doing theology with the assumption that queer people belong
Linn Marie Tonstad summarizes a far more interesting conversation about sex and gender than the one I grew up with.