Resident Theologian
About the Blog
My latest (four): radicals, connectors, gods, and devils
Links to my four latest reviews and essays.
My latest: a review of American Heretics, in LARB
A link to my review of Jerome Copulsky’s new book.
My latest: on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, in Hedgehog Review
Link to and except from my latest essay: a reflection on the politics of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels in The Hedgehog Review.
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.
I’m in Mere O on church and culture
My latest essay, “Once More, Church and Culture,” is in the new issue of Mere Orthodoxy.
Beliefs of the post-Christian West
Early on in Mark Sayers’ 2016 book Disappearing Church he outlines, in the form of propositions, the social imaginary or set of presuppositions that suffuse and animate the contemporary post-Christian context in the West.
One long thought on Wood v. Keller
It seems to me that there is a single pressing issue raised by James Wood’s essay (and follow-up) on Tim Keller: namely, the social and political fortunes of evangelical churches under social and political conditions that are truly post-Christendom.
The uses of conservatism
In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.
Lightspeed politics
I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.
New essay: “Market Apocalypse” in Mere Orthodoxy
My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste: