The C. S. Lewis Test

I’ve written before about the need for American evangelicals to press the pause button on their love affair with C. S. Lewis, and in particular for American evangelical writers to take a break from quoting Lewis as well as a dozen other big names like Chesterton, Tolkien, Guinness, Chambers, Schaeffer, Henry, Graham, Kuyper, Piper, Keller, Stott, Packer, and Machen. Not because they’re not worth reading, learning from, or excerpting, but because their prominence in Protestant writing is so prominent that it crowds out other voices. More to the point, focusing overmuch on these figures—lionizing them, quoting and re-quoting them, treating them like the only doctors and saints the church has to offer or learn from—fails to learn the first lesson one ought to take from their example, namely, their vast erudition and mastery of fields and authors not themselves. I call this “aping the Inklings.” And we should cut it out, myself included.

Having said that, I’ve realized over the years that, when I’m reading non-evangelicals or non-Christians, I find myself unconsciously applying to them a kind of inverted test. Call it the C. S. Lewis Test. It is what it sounds like: I want to know whether the author in question, if he or she lived and wrote in the last seventy-five years, appreciates Lewis’s work. By “appreciates” I do not mean “is a fan of,” much less “worships at the feet of.” I mean, simply, “appreciates.” Lewis is renowned for a reason. He was a wonderful stylist, a sharp thinker, and a medieval scholar. He wrote poems, allegories, novels, children’s stories, essays, reviews, academic monographs, and apologetics. The man had, and has, much to edify anyone with an open mind, on any number of subjects. He was catholic and ecumenical in his tastes, his friends, his topics. I’m thinking, for example, of his late (recorded and transcribed) conversation with Kingsley Amis on the subject of science fiction. These two writers couldn’t have been more different. But you can sense each of them feeling the other out, poking, jabbing, teasing, querying. And each man comes out unscathed, with, I take it, a measure of respect for the other.

So, as I say, when I read someone—anyone—writing since World War II, if I read much of his or her work, I wait for the choice Lewis quote, the unapologetic citation, the sly allusion. If the writer is worthy of respect, be he pagan or skeptic or anything else, it usually comes. You don’t have to love Narnia to appreciate his criticism, or to like his Space Trilogy to value his writing on education, or to share his faith to take his philosophy seriously. And it also tells me the writer in question isn’t ashamed to quote someone as popular or ostensibly middlebrow as Lewis, as if associating with a writer that evangelicals love might sully one’s reputation with readers who matter. It tells me, in other words, that the writer cares more about truth, style, or both than about superficial appearances. And that’s enough to win over this reader.

Simon Leys

2025 was the year I discovered Simon Leys.

The discovery came in the Regent College bookstore in Vancouver. The book was The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. I’m a sucker for essay collections; this one was a NYRB Classics edition; it was big and hefty and the topics were gloriously wide ranging.

Somehow I’d never heard of Leys’ name. For the fellow uninitiated, “Simon Leys” is the pen name for Pierre Ryckmans (1935–2014), a Belgian essayist, novelist, translator, and scholar of Chinese literature, art, and calligraphy. He read, spoke, and wrote in French, English, and Chinese. His 1971 book about Mao was a bombshell in the playground of the postmodern French intellectuals—it woke everyone up to the unvarnished truth of the Cultural Revolution. He lived and taught for decades in Australia as a professor. He won a raft of awards, had a novel adapted into a film, and wrote gorgeous prose about everything under the sun. He was also Roman Catholic.

Above all, Leys was a man of letters. To read him is to be inducted into another world, the world of literature, a world made of books, words, and the men and women who write them. Yes, history and politics enter in, but it’s the words that matter, the selection of which words in what order to what end. The man knew style because he possessed it himself.

Simon Leys was a man of principle who did not flinch from criticizing living dictators, “China experts,” and academics full of hot air. He was a moralist who refused to moralize and an aesthete who believed in truth. He had no compunction about calling pundits’ and intellectuals’ bluff, as in his extraordinary reviews, respectively, of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Mother Teresa and of Edward Said’s Orientalism. (The final sentence of the latter review: “It is nice to see that Said is now rediscovering such a basic notion; I only deplore that it took him 300 pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at last one sound and fundamental truism.”)

Reading writers like Leys is more than a breath of fresh air. It’s a gust of wind at your back. It shows you your own moral and intellectual cowardice, not to mention the absolute void that is your learning compared to such a man. But far from enervating, the epiphany empowers. It’s a call and therefore a calling: This life, the writing life, the life of the mind in the life of letters, is possible. Don’t give up, not yet.

“There is no sublunary topic,” Leys wrote, “on which Samuel Johnson did not, at some time, issue a pithy and definitive statement.” You could say the same about Simon Leys. He was that good. I’m grateful to have discovered his voice, and through his so many others.

Why I’ve not been blogging

I’ve just been too busy. That’s the reason.

There are other reasons, or reasons behind the reasons. For instance, my sabbatical from teaching lasted from May 2024 to August 2025—a full sixteen months away from the classroom. During that time, I published two books, drafted a third, and kept up a publishing schedule of two to four essays/reviews per month. On top of that I did dozens of podcasts, mostly publicity for the books, but also more regular fare for Mere Fidelity. And I began traveling more than I ever have before, giving talks and lectures at colleges, conferences, and churches.

And then I returned to the classroom, without slowing any of that down. You can imagine how that went. September and October formed an airtight bottleneck of deadlines I barely met and in some cases did not. I’m out of that now, and mostly I’m recovering.

The obvious point is that I can’t keep up a sabbatical schedule of commitments while teaching a full course load of undergraduate classes. I was foolish to try to combine them without giving something up.

More than that, I’ve simply realized that in the 40-45 hours I give to work each week, besides teaching, grading, meetings with colleagues, and meetings with students, I have time for the following (in order):

1. Email

2. Reading

3. Writing

4. Podcasts

“Blogging” is distinct, because writing means either paid work or academic work that will pay for itself later, in other currency. If I have a spare moment to write—for that matter, if I have even the germ of an idea for anything that could be written of interest to others—then I’m going to give it to an essay, a review, an article, or a book manuscript. I can micro blog because it takes mere seconds, and I never develop anything essay-like over there. Here at the mezzo blog, by contrast, it’s difficult to justify the time, even 15-20 minutes’ worth. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, which means that I’d always (without exception!) be better off reading than blogging. But in that case, as I’ve discovered in practice, the blogging will go by the wayside entirely.

What does that mean, then? For one, it means that I remain secure in my decision to stay off social media; for another, it means that I won’t be joining the Substack cinematic universe anytime soon. From the bottom of my heart I do not understand how anyone—by which I mean writers and academics—even owns an account on these platforms, much less gives them the time of day. If that were me, I would accomplish literally nothing: I would write nothing, read nothing, and do nothing but scroll, half-reading “notes” and tweets and suchlike, intermittently, in every nook and cranny of my days.

Since I would like to read and write, when I’m not doing other things, it stands to reason that I should stay off. So I will. Having said that, I’m going to give mezzo blogging one more try between Thanksgiving week and the New Year. If there’s just no way to squeeze it in, then this space may be reduced semi-permanently to a ghost town of occasional announcements and little more. If so, so be it. But I do love blogging, and I especially love reading others’ blogging, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t make it work again.

In the coming weeks, then, expect more posts. And if they don’t appear, then you’ll know what I’ll have already learned: in this season of life, there’s just no time for it.

My latest: del Toro’s Frankenstein, in CT

This past Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The title is “In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker,” with the following subheading: “The Guillermo del Toro adaptation brings unique perspective—but fails to match the depth of its source material.” That’s a fair representation of the review, which is critical of the film but appreciative of some of its virtues, not least Jacob Elordi’s performance and some of del Toro’s marvelous compositions. The last lines of the review sums up my theological take, too.

I must say I love the opportunity to moonlight as a film critic for CT. The original review I submitted was basically a cinematic recap of del Toro’s entire filmography, some of which remains in the final version. Turns out I got multiple degrees in theology and a job as a tenured professor just so I could finally fulfill my heart’s desire as a teenage cinephiliac: to get paid to write about the movies. What a life.

My latest (four): radicals, connectors, gods, and devils

I had four pieces come out in the last month, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t even posted links to the blog. Apologies all. One of my goals for 2027 is to back into the blogging game; all my time for writing and editing has gone to paid pieces, so it’s hard to justify more time here. In any case, here are the relevant links:

• “You Don’t Have To Be Radical” (CT, October 7) is a fun little autobiographical ode to the evangelical aughts and the perennial dynamic of young Christians who get it in their heads that there’s only one way to follow Jesus: by being “radical.”

• “The Connector” (Arc, October 9) is a profile of the wonderful Leah Libresco Sargeant, timed to the release of her excellent new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, published in October with the University of Notre Dame Press. Thanks to editor extraordinaire Mark Oppenheimer for getting me to do this, or rather letting me try my hand at it as a non-journalist first-timer.

• “Keeping the Faith” (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23) is a review essay of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s new book Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, published in October with Yale University Press. My first time in the Review.

• Finally, the academic journal Modern Theology posted an early-access online version of my review of Philip Ziegler’s new book God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil, which came out in September with Baylor University Press.

My latest (six): UFOs, leftists, Hitler, Scripture, doctrine, and PSA

I’ve been remiss of late, not sharing links to my latest pieces when they go up. I’ve had six essays or reviews published since August 7, the last time I posted on this blog. Here’s a quick round-up of links:

• “Lexicon for the Phenomenon” is in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review, and is no longer paywalled. It’s about UFOs, or rather, how we talk about UFOs in public, and the ways theology can shed some terminological light on ufology.

• “Hating Hitler Is Not Enough” (CT, August 12) is my review of Alec Ryrie’s new book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. The book is very good—indeed, welcome and opportune—but the final two chapters, in which Ryrie gives advice to conservatives and progressives, left me underwhelmed.

• “The Bible Is About Jesus—but Not Jesus Without His Bride” (CT, August 26) is my review of Jonathan Linebaugh’s new book The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture. Wonderfully written and engaging and Lutheran in the best way—but almost completely devoid of the church, both as an encompassing liturgical-sacramental context for the hearing of Scripture and as the corporate communal human agent for the writing of Scripture. Alan thought I was unfair, but I leave you to be the judge.

• “The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess” (CT, September 16) is my attempt to arbitrate between pro- and anti-PSA Christians, who very rarely either argue well or even get each other’s views right. I’m not much of a PSA-er myself, but nine times out of town I’m unimpressed by the anti-PSA brigade: its posture uncharitable, its rhetoric overheated, its arguments overcooked. Then again, neither are pro-PSA folks faultless in these debates. So I say: Let’s argue better—as Christians.

• “Politics for Losers” is in the latest issue of First Things, paywalled for now but not for long. It’s my review of Phil Christman’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists. I see that Phil has read it and isn’t angry but isn’t sure whether he’ll reply. While he holds us in suspense, check out some other reviews of the book by Matthew Loftus, Todd Shy, Adam Roberts (paywalled for me), and (not yet published, but forthcoming in Mere Orthodoxy) Bonnie Kristian.

• Finally, The Heythrop Journal published my review of Frances M. Young’s two-volume Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity. If you know Young, you already know how fortunate we are that we have these two works of extraordinary patristic scholarship. I’ll close this post with the paragraph that opens the review:
  
  Midway through her ninth decade of life, after nearly sixty years of prolific and wide-ranging scholarship, Frances Young offers us, if not a parting gift, then a fitting one: a two-volume summative account of Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity. At around 650 pages total, and running from Justin Martyr to Theodoret of Cyrus, or the roughly 300 years from the middle of the second century through to the middle of the fifth, this single work is the capstone to an extraordinary career. The books, articles, and accolades are too many to count. I pause here at the outset, then, instead of waiting until the end, to register my thanks and not a little awe. Young has not only deepened scholarly understanding of early Christianity in all its vast complexity. She has built up the people of God. Would that all of us could say the same.

My latest: gentiles and the Torah, in CT

Earlier this week Christianity Today published my latest article, called “Put Down the Shofar.” Bluntly stated, it’s a call for gentile Christians to stop cosplaying as observant Jews. It’s written much more gently than that, though. Here’s how it opens:

One day a student approached me after class with an urgent question. The course was on the doctrine of the church, and we’d spent a few weeks on Abraham, Israel, and the law of Moses. Some years back, my student’s family left a mainstream congregation to found a house church which sought to be more like the Christian communities in the Book of Acts. Though Gentiles, they began observing Jewish customs and celebrating the festivals commanded by Moses, including Passover.

My student asked me earnestly, “Were we wrong?” This small church was trying to heed the admonition of James to “be doers of the word,” following “the perfect law, the law of liberty” (1:22–25, RSV throughout). And their logic was impeccable: The Torah (the Hebrew word for the law of Moses) is God’s Word for God’s people. Baptized Gentiles are members of God’s people; therefore, they ought to obey these commands.

The question is not a trivial one, nor is it obscure in American Christian life. You’re likely familiar with shofars blown in public, Seder meals for Passover, and circumcision for baby boys. But as common and well-intended as these may be, I want to explain why I told my student that, yes, his house church was wrong—or at least, misguided. The New Testament is not silent on the question of Gentile observance of the law of Moses. And its answer is a firm no.

Read the rest here.

My latest: a review of American Heretics, in LARB

I’m in the Los Angeles Review of Books today with a review of Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order. Here are the opening paragraphs:

CHRISTIANITY HAS NEVER been certain of its place in the United States. True, from the beginning, it has been more or less acknowledged as the state religion. In fact, the nation’s frontier spirit seized the faith and multiplied it a hundredfold: in the time between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln alone, the former colonies sprung forth Methodists, Mormons, Adventists, and Stone-Campbellites. The US is infamous for its energetic, fissiparous, and entrepreneurial religiosity, a religiosity essentially Protestant in style, if not always in substance.

At the same time, the Constitution is conspicuous in its failure to mention Christ, scripture, or even a generic deity. The government is said to derive its powers from the consent of the governed, not from any transcendent source. The voice of the people supersedes, or perhaps constitutes, the mandate of heaven. Lacking formal establishment or official preeminence, therefore, American Christians have had to rely on the ambient culture, social activism, voting, and sheer numbers to maintain a dominant presence in public affairs. Anxiety about the decline of that presence is itself a long-running measure of Christian involvement in, acceptance of, and alienation from the American project.

It is this third category, the politically alienated, that forms the subject of Jerome E. Copulsky’s recent book American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (2024). Specifically, Copulsky considers seven groups of Christians who have dissented from the American consensus, in part or in whole. Some rejected democracy; others, disestablished religion; still others, liberal modesty with respect to human nature and the common good. All of them marshaled arguments and movements to reform, repair, renew, or replace the given constitutional order. Copulsky calls his book a “heresiography” of the individuals, ideas, and institutions dedicated to these aims, since they understood themselves to be “theological-political adversaries of the American order” and, thus, “American heretics.” Having departed from political orthodoxy, they stood under liberal anathema. They stand there still.

Click here to read the rest.

My latest: a review of Ryan Burge, in The Lamp

In the latest issue of The Lamp, which just went online today, I have a review of Ryan P. Burge’s new book The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future. The review is called “The Stickiness of Religion." Here are the opening paragraphs:

Social science fiction—this was Albert Murray’s term of art for the kind of “pseudo-scientific” analysis he saw applied to black life in the 1960s. Too many, he observed, were tempted “to mistake the jargon of social science for insight into the nature and condition of man.” The result was “social science fiction fiction,” namely, novels posing as gritty, revelatory art that merely rendered in narrative form the pathologies and policies proposed by “current survey methodology.” By contrast, Murray’s approach was “distinctly proliterary,” that is to say, humanist in its presumption “that interpretations of human behavior in the raw require at least as much respect for the complexity of human motives as the interpretation of a poem or play or a story.”

Although Murray, a distinguished critic and novelist himself, was primarily concerned with the subject of race in America, his point stands as well for the academic study of religion. Murray may not have known what a “wonk” was, but had he seen one coming down the street, he would have turned and run on the spot.

Ryan P. Burge is the premier wonk of American religion today. A professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and the author of the Graphs about Religion Substack, Burge has contributed to just about every major newspaper and religious or political magazine. When journalists want to know what’s going on with American religion—usually evangelicalism or Catholicism—they turn to Burge and his trove of ready-made charts. He was at the forefront of popularizing and explaining “the rise of the Nones” and co-operated in the study, published two years ago in The Great Dechurching, that found forty million American adults who used to attend church but no longer do so.

Click here to read the rest. When I wrote the piece I had no idea it would be in the issue commemorating the passing of Pope Francis—nor that I would be just one review separated from Christopher Caldwell. I’m grateful to be included.

My latest: why we shouldn’t pronounce God’s Name, in CT

I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a column called “The God Who Must Not Be Named.” It addresses the trend, bordering on a fad, of evangelical pastors and scholars pronouncing the Name of YHWH aloud. I sympathize with the reasons why they do so, but argue that they (and we) should not.

Hat tip to Kendall Soulen, whose fingerprints are all over this piece. And hat tip also to my local Sunday morning Bible class, who in May patiently heard a dress rehearsal of this argument when I kicked off a new series on John Mark Comer’s book on the Name.

My (two) latest: reviews of Morell and Huerter, in CT

Last Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Clare Morell’s new book The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. The title is “Finally, a Tech Book That Doesn’t Pull Punches,” and that captures the tone of the review, which is overwhelmingly positive. Morell has officially joined my personal Mount Rushmore of tech books to assign and recommend to others—alongside Crouch, Haidt, and Newport.

Michael Huerter’s new book is not among them. This morning CT published my review of Huerter’s book, titled The Hybrid Congregation: A Practical Theology of Worship for an Online Era. In fact, “Just Say No to Online Church” is probably the most negative book review I’ve ever written. The opening sentence is a single word: Nein! That probably tells you all you need to know. But it’s worth reading on for the issues that Huerter raises for pastors and theologians alike. If DJ Soto, bishop of the metaverse—i.e., “Virtual Reality Church and MMO Church”—didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. But he does, and the claims he makes call for an answer. For the time being, this review is mine.

My latest: the fate of American Protestantism, in Public Discourse

A couple months back First Things published my essay “Goldilocks Protestantism.” An editor at The Public Discourse asked if I might follow that focus on the global context with an essay on the American context. Et voila, I’m in Public Discourse today with “Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism.”

Here’s a preview:

Protestantism as we know it, both nationally and globally, is on life support. The Christian world has become either “high,” meaning catholic, or “low,” meaning evangelical. The one includes bishops and priests, liturgy and tradition, creeds and councils, icons and saints, relics and mystics, Mary and monks, whereas the other includes none of the above. The excluded middle is the Protestantism of the Reformation, a “Goldilocks” Gospel that strives to be neither too high nor too low, but just right. By my reckoning, this style of faith makes up no more than 10 percent of global Christianity. In truth it may be as low as 5 percent, and its numbers continue to decline.

That’s the global story. Now I’d like to focus on the national story. As Hemingway once described the onset of bankruptcy, American Protestantism collapsed slowly, then all at once. Precisely while it was building to an extraordinary, dominating height in the 1960s, its competitors and eventual replacements were growing as well, biding their time. They only had to wait. Termites had long since found their way to the foundation. Once it was destroyed from within, there was no way to reverse the damage. The house was doomed to fall.

Let’s date the pinnacle to the late 1950s. By one estimate, in 1958, more than half of all Americans belonged to a “mainline” Protestant denomination. Think Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. It’s a mistake to wonder how many of these were “actual” as opposed to “nominal” Christians. The social prestige was the point. A prestigious institution is powerful just to the extent that it attracts members regardless of their beliefs. The “mainline” was what you belonged to if you aspired to join—or sought the respect of, or wanted to remain in—the class that ran the country. Presidents, politicians, and businessmen placed formal membership in a known and vetted Protestant denomination. They were neither irreligious nor part of the riffraff (fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Mormons). Like Roman philosophers, their private skepticism and unchristian habits were beside the point: civil religion binds society together. Pay your tithes, say your prayers, make the sacrifices; otherwise the center might not hold.

The center did not hold anyway. Today perhaps fewer than one in ten Americans is a mainline Protestant, and most of them don’t go to church. Demographers predict that in the next dozen years this percentage will trend downward until it settles around one to three percent. So what happened?

Go read the rest here.

My latest: on the joys of Dude Perfect, in CT

My latest for Christianity Today is called “How Dude Perfect Won Me Over.” At one level it’s a sincere thank you letter to DP for giving my boys something silly and fun to watch over the last couple years; at a deeper level it’s an excuse to think out loud about screens, boys, and adult masculinity. At a minimum it’s my attempt to show that I’m not a total Luddite, and that I do live and raise my children in the world as it is and not as I wish it would be…

My latest: Goldilocks Protestantism, in FT

I’ve got an essay in the latest issue of First Things called “Goldilocks Protestantism.” Here are the opening lines:

Imagine a world without Protestantism.

I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups of Christians. The first group encompasses believers who belong to ancient fellowships led by bishops and ordained priests, who confess the Creed and their sins and celebrate the Eucharist in a traditional liturgy of word and sacrament. These believers hand on tradition, petition the saints, venerate icons, and baptize their babies. Call them “catholic.”

Call the other group “evangelicals.” They have no creed but the ­Bible. They have no bishops or priests; instead, they have ministers and elders, who are rarely ordained. They baptize not infants but adults, who can make a public declaration of faith. They reject the interposition of anyone or anything between the individual and Jesus, who is known immediately in the soul and clearly through the Scriptures.

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

Read the whole thing here. For folks who don’t subscribe to the magazine, the essay is not paywalled, though it may seem that way; you just have to create a free account with your email and you’ll get immediate access.

My latest: Luddite pedagogy, in the CHE

This morning I have an “advice” essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Luddite Pedagogy: It’s OK to Ignore AI in Your Teaching.” From the middle of the piece:

Although I’ve had, over the years, a handful of mild objections to my classroom tech principles, my students rarely if ever complain. They don’t negotiate or beg for relief. A few years back, they even voted me Teacher of the Year. Far from coming at me with pitchforks, in fact, a majority of my students thank me for my “strict” rules. Why? Because they’re well aware of the effects the ambient techno-pedagogical infrastructure produces in them.

Take an online grade sheet. It’s perpetually accessible and constantly changing, with every update generating an automatic notification to a student’s phone. That doesn’t relieve anxiety — it exacerbates it. As for the classroom itself, my students know and hate that they can’t concentrate in a typical screen-populated course. They are distracted by their own phone or laptop, and even when they find the will to turn it off, their eyes drift to a classmate’s device.

Put it this way: If we set out to design an environment that would undermine educational success — to interfere with listening, thinking, and conversing, and disrupt sustained focus and rapt attention — we would invent the contemporary college classroom. Why must we accept it as given?

Click here to read the whole thing.

I first described “Luddite pedagogy” here on the blog back in 2018. I see now that Audrey Watters (my ed-tech-critic hero) used the same phrase in 2020, drawing on a 2014 essay by Torn Halves. Haven’t read either yet, but hoping to get to them soon.

My latest: why baptism isn’t optional, in CT

This week Christianity Today published a long column from me—more than 3,000 words!—on baptism. It’s called “Baptism Is Not Optional,” which pretty much cuts to the heart of the matter. I texted a link to a friend and said, “I’ve never been more CoC … or catholic.” And that’s the truth.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

We don’t, thank God, burn or drown fellow Christians over baptism anymore. In fact, talking about baptism today—about getting it right in doctrine and practice and hence about ways of getting it wrong—feels like breaking a ceasefire. Our present ecumenical peace is hard won and fragile. Why threaten to disturb it?

My answer is simple: The truth matters, baptism matters, and too many churches handle baptism in the lackadaisical, emotive, and diminishing way I see in my classroom. So, let’s actually talk about what baptism is, what it isn’t, and what Scripture and tradition teach about it.

Cards on the table: I hold a full-blown, whole-hog “high sacramental” view of baptism. It’s a visible word of the gospel; it’s a means of grace; it’s an effective sign. By the power of God’s Word and Spirit, baptism does what baptism says: It washes you clean. It gives you Christ; it gives you his Spirit; it gives you his saving grace. “Baptism,” as the apostle Peter succinctly puts it, “saves you” (1 Pet. 3:21, RSV throughout).

Read the whole thing here.

My latest: on generation autodidact, in Mockingbird

This morning I’ve got an essay in Mockingbird called “Generation Autodidact.” It’s about bookworms like me who are constantly trying to fill in the gaps in their reading, and about Gen Z kids who don’t read books at all, and how they seek out learning anyway, and what they might do when they reach their thirties and forties, and how we should all think about autodidacticism in a postliterate age. Here are the first four paragraphs:

Every bookworm knows the rule: don’t roll your eyes at mispronunciation of big words or foreign names; the speaker is probably a voracious reader who learned the term not from speech but from the page. For instance, growing up I thought segue was spelled “segway,” like the scooter. When I saw the word in writing I mentally rhymed it with league, having no idea what it meant.

I don’t recall who set me straight on that one, but I’m forever grateful to my boss at the library where I worked during seminary. Barth, Rahner, and Schleiermacher no longer twitch in their graves when I say their names. I now try to recall this blessed ignorance when my students rhyme “Barth” with hearth, or when they give me funny looks when I refer to “Saint Augustine,” with emphasis apparently on the wrong syllable. Isn’t he the one the grass is named for?

I’d like to propose an analogue to the bookworm rule: don’t roll your eyes at personalized lists of Important Books to read in a year, or earnest admissions of having read and enjoyed Wrong Authors. The reason is simple: everyone has to begin somewhere. Someone ignorant of the classics is wise to begin there, with canonical titles she’s heard countless times but never tried for herself. Whether the titles thus heard are in fact classics is one of the things that, by definition, she cannot know in advance of reading them.

With literature, the only way to make a judgment about quality is by developing it through continuous exposure to, well, all of it — the good, the bad, and the middling. Criticizing an ill-read person’s unwitting plan to take up Ayn Rand, given how many times he’s seen her name pop up over the years, is an exercise in missing the point. Not only could our enterprising upstart not know Rand is bad before reading her, but spending time with her may well be the start of a search for beauty, not having found it in the dim dungeons of objectivism.

Click here to read the whole thing.

My latest: a review of Ross Douthat’s new book, in CT

This morning I’m in Christianity Today with a review of Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I set the table with the changing fortunes of religion in the public square, then turn to Pascal:

Ross Douthat, a Catholic columnist for The New York Times, has written a new book in response to this moment and to the readers he’s trying to reach. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat makes a Pascalian pitch to the curious among the post-secular crowd.

Blaise Pascal was a French thinker who lived 400 years ago. His too was a time of religious and technological upheaval, one straddling the end of the Middle Ages, the Reformation’s fresh divisions of Christendom, and the beginnings of “enlightened” modernity. In such a time, and in response especially to religion’s cultured despisers, Pascal wrote that the first task for Christian thinkers is “to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.” This is just what Douthat sets out to do, and he likewise follows Pascal in stressing the existential urgency of religious questions and the necessity of placing one’s wager.

“It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal,” as Pascal put it. “Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance.” And though we may (or may not!) have more than a week to live, inaction is impossible. You cannot choose not to choose. Your life is your seat at the table, and you must play the cards you were dealt. Declining to play is not an option; folding is itself a play.

Pascal famously chose to wager: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.” Douthat doesn’t quite take this tack, but Pascal’s confidence and resolution, his unwillingness to let the reader off the hook, are present on every page. 

From there I turn to the book itself. Click here to read the whole thing.

My latest: a review of Wesley Hill’s new book on the resurrection

On Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Wesley Hill’s new book, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus. Titled “A Little Book About a Little Word That Contains the World,” it starts this way:

Only 25 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul wrote to some new believers that “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14). The Resurrection is not the conclusion of the gospel; it is its beginning and center. Had Jesus remained dead, had the tomb not been empty, there would be no Good News to proclaim. In fact, there would be no news at all—corpses stay dead every day. One more wouldn’t muster interest.

For the apostles, theologian Michael Ramsey once wrote, “the Gospel without the Resurrection was not merely a Gospel without its final chapter: It was not a Gospel at all.” Put simply, “Christian theism is Resurrection-theism.”

It is passing strange, then, that so many people have tried so diligently to wrench Jesus away from the Resurrection—without, that is, accepting the consequences. Philosophers tried their hand at it during the Enlightenment, then skeptical biblical scholars took the baton and have been running with it since. 

When Ramsey published his little book The Resurrection of Christ about 80 years ago, he was responding to Protestant liberals who wanted to retain Jesus’ life and teachings but not his living presence. “The modern mind cannot accept the idea of a bodily resurrection for humanity,” he quotes from H. K. Luce’s commentary on Luke. (Ah yes, we meet again: the modern mind, that infallible fortress of scholarly prejudice. When you see its towers looming on the horizon, turn and run as fast as you can in the other direction.)

Click here to read the rest. Add Wes’s book to your reading list for the Lenten and Easter seasons this spring!

My latest: how to raise readers, in Front Porch Republic

This morning Front Porch Republic published an essay of mine called “How to Raise Readers, in Thirty-Five Steps.” It’s a list of, as the title suggests, thirty-five things for parents to do to raise their children to be readers, with running commentary. It’s fun and light-hearted in tone, certainly the most “advice-y” piece I’ve ever written. Here are the first four paragraphs, before the list proper gets going:

It is not too much to say that everything in our culture pushes against habits of deep reading. Our ears are filled with noise, our eyes are stuck on screens, and our attention is scattered and distracted by a thousand entertainments.

Parents and teachers are worried; I’m both a dad and a professor, and I’m very worried. My worry increases when I think about handing on the faith. Not every believer needs to be literate, much less a casual reader of Dante or Milton. But Christian faith is irreducibly wordy, its details and contours forever fixed in the complex texts of Holy Scripture and sacred tradition. Readers are interpreters, if not by their eyes then by their ears, and bad interpreters can do a lot of damage.

Indeed, the very habits that sustain deep reading are crucial for sustaining prayer. If I lack the attention to keep my eyes on a page I can see, how can I have the attention to keep my heart on a God I cannot see? Reading is not necessary for prayer, but it is one helpful training ground for it.

Is it possible, then, to raise readers in a digital age? I think so. I’ve got four kids, two boys then two girls, who range from sixth grade to first. I can’t say I’ve done much well, but I have raised readers. Every child is different, and aptitude and opportunity both matter greatly. Nevertheless, within varying limits, there are certain things parents can do to make it more likely that their children will learn good reading habits—even become lifelong readers themselves. Here are the ones that have worked well for our family.

Click here to read the rest. I welcome other suggestions!