Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Subtweets, backshadowing, and Saint Barnabas
A follow-up to the previous post on a style of punditry that denies contingency.
Carr, Sacasas, and eloquent reality
A long reflection on an essay by Nicholas Carr engaging L. M. Sacasas about enchantment, reality, and contemplation.
My latest: a review of Ross Douthat’s new book, in CT
A link to my review of Douthat’s new book on religion in Christianity Today.
The greatest threat facing the church today
Thinking out loud about answers in response to this question.
Enchantment redux
A second attempt at sketching and defending the re-enchantment phenomenon.
Enchantment
A brief word on the renewed interest in "enchantment" over against "disenchantment."
Screentopia
A rant about the concern trolls who think the rest of us are too alarmist about children, screens, social media, and smartphones.
Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline
Reflections on the appeal of Catholicism rather than Protestantism to public intellectuals as well as the possibility of a new conservative Protestant mainline in America.
Decline and its possibilities
Is decline possible? Not just for society, but for the church? How, in any case, should Christians write and think about it? A reflection occasioned by anti-declinist authors.
Defining “culture”
Responding to Alan Jacobs’ critique of my undefined and indiscriminate use of “culture” in my recent Mere O essay.
Once more, negative world
A response to Alan Jacobs’ response to my response (and others’) to Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds” framework.
Jimmy’s change
So far as I can tell—but I haven’t been trawling Twitter for contrarian takes—Alan Jacobs’ negative reaction to the Better Call Saul finale (spoilers herein, obviously) is the exception to the rule. The people I read loved it. Friends and family who watch it loved it. I loved it. But it’s useful to read a take against the grain. Is Alan right?
Kim, breaking bad
A comment on Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul and, you know, original sin.
Deflating tech catastrophism
There’s no better way to deflate my proclivities for catastrophism—a lifelong project of my long-suffering wife—than writers I respect appealing to authorities like St. Augustine and Wendell Berry. And that’s just what my friends Jeff Bilbro and Alan Jacobs have done in two pieces this week responding to my despairing reflections on digital technology, prompted by Andy Crouch’s wonderful new book, The Life We’re Looking For.
Teaching a 4/4: freedom
This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on what it means to be a scholar in the academy with a 4/4 teaching load. The first discussed the allotment of one’s hours in a 4/4 load; the second compared apples and oranges in terms of institutional contexts (i.e., the material and structural differences between the Ivy League and teaching colleges, as well as between partnered parents and single persons without children); the third offered a series of tips and strategies for 4/4 profs who want to make, foster, and protect the time necessary for reading and writing. This fourth and last post is a companion to the third, discussing in broader terms some of the gifts and opportunities afforded by serving at a teaching-heavy university.
Foundation
Later this month the television adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will premiere on Apple+. I had been planning on writing something about it, then doubled down on that plan when I read a piece resorting to that laziest but most common of critical terms of approval these days: the R-word. You know what it is. “Relevant.”
Alan Jacobs on avoiding unpaid labor for surveillance capitalism
...it’s important to understand that a lot of what we call leisure now is actually not leisure. It is unpaid labor on behalf of surveillance capitalism, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. That is, we are all working for Google, we are working for Facebook.
New piece published in Mere Orthodoxy: "Befriending Books: On Reading and Thinking with Alan Jacobs and Zena Hitz"
I'm in Mere Orthodoxy with a long review-essay of two new books: Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs and Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Here's a section from the opening: