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October 9, 2019

Volume 136, Issue #21

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Features

First Person

How I learned to love the doctrine of total depravity

When unremitting human sin is something I expect, I can face evil without despair.

by Heidi Haverkamp

Readers Write

Dirt: Essays by readers

We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “dirt.”

composite of families from Succession and Schitt's Creek

Screen Time

(De)formed by wealth in Succession and Schitt’s Creek

Is there any redemption for the Roy family or the Rose family?

by Kathryn Reklis

First Person

Visiting a tent city in Mexico created by Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocol

The children here are gaunt and listless. They are running out of time.

by Matt Gaventa

Critical Essay

The holiness of Toni Morrison’s fictional worlds

Faith, in Morrison’s novels, is about improvising a way toward freedom.

by Amy Frykholm

Books

The gift of relying on others

Briallen Hopper develops an alternative to the twin American creeds of self-reliance and marriage.

by Laura Jean Torgerson

Taking implicit racial bias seriously

Jennifer Eberhardt insists that personal prejudice is deeply embedded, politically potent, and ultimately beatable.

by Andrew Packman

Action without agency

A philosophy professor races through a (predetermined?) action plot

by Joshua B. Grace

Can we survive the incalculable damage of climate change?

David Wallace-Wells charts a path for life in the wake of global warming.

by David A. Hoekema

Departments

First Words

Fear that manufactures numbness

I went to a haunted house. I did not enjoy it.

by Peter W. Marty

Faith Matters

When the chapel is the most open place on campus

Virginia Woolf’s ideal university had no chapel. Mine has more than one.

by Stephanie Paulsell

On Art

First the days, then the twinkle, then the wings, and then the quiet, by R. Sawan White

There is a gentle poetry in R. Sawan White’s work. Her paintings are subtle palimpsests of wax and oil on board, assiduously built up in translucent layers, like foggy breaths on a window smudged with fingerprints....

Art selection and comment by Aaron Rosen

From the Editors

The kinds of stories Toni Morrison told

No one has done more to transform the language for thinking about America’s racial past.

News

People

United Methodist pastor will face church trial for being a "self-avowed practicing homosexual."

United Methodist pastor Anna Blaedel will face a church trial for “practices declared by the United Methodist Church to be incompatible with Christian teachings, including . . . being a self-avowed practicing homosexual.”...

by Arthur McClanahan and Dan Gangler