Resident Theologian
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My latest: on Houellebecq (in Mere O) and Forgiveness (in Comment)
Links to two new essays just published online.
Two new essays for y’all.
The first was published last week at Mere Orthodoxy, on January 7, the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which came out the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Jake Meador was kind enough to get it up in time for the anniversary—I was surprised not to see any other outlets noting the date—and gave it the title, “A Future Worthy of Life: Houellebecq, Decadence, and Sacraments.” It’s about the insights and shortcomings of Houellebecq’s critique of the West, parallels in other recent novels, and the superior vision (and prescription) found in P. D. James’s Children of Men. (The lesson, as always: James is the queen.)
The other essay came out last month in the print issue of Comment, but it’s been behind a paywall until today. In the magazine it has the title “Promise, Gift, Command”; online it goes by “The Theological Terrain of Forgiveness,” which tracks with the issue’s overarching theme of forgiveness. It’s my attempt at locating, delimiting, and unpacking the Christian doctrine of God’s forgiveness of our sins in Christ, by the Spirit, through the sacraments—and the implications for our own call to imitate this divine action in our daily lives.
Thanks for reading. More soon.
2024: blogging
A rundown of the year on the blog.
Counting this one, I published a total of eighty-three posts on the blog this year. At least half were themselves just news, updates, or links to pieces published elsewhere. In other words, not a lot of original writing in this space. Which makes sense, since any half-baked ideas I would have blogged about in the past became columns for Christianity Today.
In any case, here is a rundown, loosely categorized, of what I did write on the blog in 2024.
10. I annotated an old-fashioned blogroll of one hundred writers I follow.
9. I wrote about Antoine Fuqua’s “real movies” and Alex Garland’s seriously misunderstood Civil War.
8. I wrote altogether too much about Star Wars: three posts on The Acolyte, another comparing Catholic Jedi to Protestant wizards, and a long series of twenty-three thoughts on The Phantom Menace.
7. I loved Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem and thought Percival Everett’s James powerful but flawed.
6. I fell in love with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, but noted the absence of religion and imagined a similar book called Theological Amnesia.
5. I wrote about the church and the Eucharist and the desire and search for both.
4. I wrote about disenchantment and reenchantment and the search for both.
3. Theologically, I wondered what idols promise; I argued what biblicism can’t get you; I outlined the metaphysics of historical criticism; discussed the unspoken Name; elaborated Protestant subtraction; and proposed a sort of fallacy: “no true cessationist.”
2. In terms of miscellany, I wrote about the NBA, ancient illiteracy, second naivete in biblical scholarship, the reception of C. S. Lewis among American evangelicals, and forty examples of my “tiers” of writing.
1. This year on the blog I wrote the most about digital technology: how it’s the greatest threat facing the church today; why I changed my mind on podcasts; what it costs not to be on social media; what it means to write with or without a “platform”; how boys are affected by video games; the simple principle governing screens and distractions; the dangers of screentopia; how social media is bad for reading (and we all know it); what unites the best books about technology; a taxonomy of tech attitudes; and the Bartleby rule for the “necessity” or “inevitability” of adopting new technologies.
2024: writing
A list of what I published this year, replete with links and a bit of commentary.
This was a banner year for my writing in more ways that one.
First, I had two books published in October. These were my first true “popular” books, i.e., not written for an academic audience. I have no idea whether or how well they are selling. But I am happy with them; the reviews have all been quite positive; and the podcasts I did for my little digital publicity tour were a blast. I couldn’t be more grateful.
Second, I began in January as something of a part-time columnist with Christianity Today. Every three weeks I send my editor an essay or book review, if I have one written, if it’s worthy to be published. In total, this year CT published eighteen pieces with my byline, one of which came out in the final print issue of the magazine.
This experience was entirely new for me: new in terms of audience and certainly new in terms of the speed and regularity of a deadline. I think I’ve gotten the hang of it, though I still write far too many words in the first draft. (Thank my editor for trimming it down and cleaning it up.) The “pitch” or “level” (or “tier”) of assumed readership at CT is very, very helpful for this logorrheic academic.
In addition to the books and columns, I published one journal article, one academic review, and eleven mid-to-highbrow essays in other venues. All in all, my estimate is that I published around 60,000 words this year, not counting the books or the blog. I’ve got plenty in the works for next year, but my number one hope is to have one or more places that have repeatedly turned me down finally give me the green light on a submission. Come twelve months from now, I guess we’ll see whether I’ve met my goal.
Here are the links.
Books
Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 1 October 2024).
The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 23 October 2024).
Academic
Review of Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture, in Interpretation 78:1 (2024): 69–71.
“Churches of Christ: Once Catholic, Now Evangelical” and “Response to the Responses,” Restoration Quarterly 66:3 (2024): 133–43, 163–69.
Essays
How to Read Paul (Commonweal, 31 January 2024). A review of Matthew Thiessen’s A Jewish Paul.
A Poet’s Faith Against Despair (Comment, 15 February 2024). A review essay of Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone. One of the better things I wrote this year, I think.
Beating Slow Horses (The Hedgehog Review, 1 March 2024). An aesthetic appreciation and political critique of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels (not the Apple show).
The Genesis of Grace (The Los Angeles Review of Books, 12 March 2024). A review of Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis.
The Home of God in the Body of Christ (Syndicate, 18 April 2024). Part of a symposium of responses to Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s The Home of God.
Mother of the Unborn God (Commonweal, 25 April 2024). A theological reflection on Mary, the incarnation, and abortion.
The Gift of Reality (The Hedgehog Review, 5 September 2024). A review of Albert Borgmann’s final (posthumously published) book, doubling as an introduction to and exploration of his work and thought as a whole.
The Reading Lives of Pastors (Sapientia, 20 August 2024). A vision for the role of reading in the vocation of ministry.
Gods Who Make Worlds (The Christian Century, 16 September 2024). An essay review of the final book in Tad Williams’ “four book trilogy,” The Last King of Osten Ard, itself a sequel to his original, 35-year old trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I use Williams as a springboard for thinking about fantasy, tragedy, and the divine comedy of grace.
The Knowledge of God (The Raised Hand, 30 October 2024). An answer in reply to the question: “What do all college students need to know?”
Promise, Gift, Command (Comment, December 2024). An essay on “The Theological Terrain of Forgiveness” (its online title). In the December print issue, and paywalled until January.
Christianity Today
All Hail the Power of … Stage Lighting? (6 February 2024). On liturgy and technology.
My Students Are Reading John Mark Comer, and Now I Know Why (14 February 2024). A review of Comer’s latest book, Practicing the Way; the most-read CT book review of the year, and one of the top-ten most read pieces published on the site period. Checks out, because my inbox exploded at the time, and the stream of emails continues unabated.
Doubt is a Ladder, Not a Home (20 February 2024). Against the sexiness of doubt.
How (Not) to Talk About Christian Nationalism (13 March 2024). What the title says. A good piece, in my opinion, that seemed to fly under the radar.
Biblical Literacy in a Postliterate Age (18 April 2024). A word of lament.
Digital Lectors for a Postliterate Age (8 May 2024). A word of hope.
The Loosening of American Evangelicalism (20 May 2024). An elaboration of a long-running thesis of mine. This one resonated!
Faithful Fathers (14 June 2024). An ode to my dad and to other faithful dads like him.
Two Cheers for the Wedding Industrial Complex (25 June 2024). Weddings are good because marriage is good! Even the over-fancy ones.
Penalty or No, Athletes Talk Faith (25 July 2024). In which I talk about LeBron and the Spurs and the Olympics and God.
Worship Together or Bowl Alone (11 September 2024). The very things our non-Christian pundits and academics are noticing our society most needs today turn out to be the byproducts of belonging to a local congregation. Coincidence or divine providence?
Make Christianity Spooky Again (22 October 2024). A review of Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder; the sixth-most read CT book review of the year.
A Vision for Screen-Free Church (28 October 2024). A sort of third entry in my loose trilogy of postliterate digital commentary.
Saints Are Strange. Martin Scorsese Gets It. (15 November 2024). A review of the new Scorsese-produced docuseries The Saints.
Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (19 November 2024). A review of Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God; the second-most read CT book review of the year, behind Comer.
Our Strength and Consolation (November/December 2024). My first print piece for CT. The online title is “The Consolation of Providence.”
Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia (11 December 2024). Self-explanatory.
The Blood Cries Out at Christmastime (19 December 2024). A reflection on three feast days of Christmastide: Saint Stephen, the Holy Innocents, and the circumcision of Jesus.
An old-fashioned (annotated) blogroll
A list of the 100 living essayists, journalists, and bloggers I always read, no matter what.
“Navigating the vastness of the Internet can feel like getting marooned in the middle of the ocean, both terrifying and sublime in its overwhelmingness.” That’s Franklin Foer in World Without Mind. He’s right. But if there’s too much to read on the internet, how to triage for the best?
One way is social media. Another is Substack. Still another is print magazines (not dead yet!).
Alongside these, my preferred mechanism is the RSS feed, which is basically a personal blogroll: a live feed, perpetually updated, of the authors and publications one wants to be sure never to miss. In principle infinite, in practice finite. Years ago a colleague asked me how I decide what to read and who my favorite contemporary writers are, and ever since then I’ve meant to draw up an old-fashioned blogroll in response to her request. Better late than never. At least it’s annotated!
To be sure, stellar newsletters with links to the best stuff are not hard to find: Arts & Letters Daily, The Browser, Prufrock. If I don’t know a writer by name or don’t keep up with a given publication, resources like these are usually how I happen upon new things, in addition to friends sharing links.
Short of grab-bags and random links, though, it’s nice to have a list of one’s own. Below I’ve drawn up a list of the writers whose work I make it a point to keep up with. I limited myself to one hundred names. Initially I organized them by category, but I opted just to run them in alphabetical order. Bios and links are meant to be helpful but, as will be clear, are sometimes tongue-in-cheek.
A few ground rules first. The listed names fit the following criteria: (a) living writers whose publishing output is (b) regular, (c) popular, and (d) accessible online. These aren’t academics whose primary work is found in scholarly journals. Nor do they mainly write books while occasionally putting out an essay. Nor still is the following list exhaustive, as if I didn’t enjoy, appreciate, respect, or follow those unnamed.
For example, Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson aren’t here, but their age is advanced enough and their essay output minimal enough that it wouldn’t make sense to include them. (They’re not exactly “online,” either.) My friend Ross McCullough is my favorite theological writer going, but I can’t induce him to write anything popular more than once every few years. I used to read Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher but slowly drifted away, even as I continue to keep an eye on their work. I’m delighted when Abigail Favale and Erika Bachiochi emerge from their scholarly dens to write popular essays, but lately it’s too rare an event by my calculation to add their names to the list. I subscribe to Robin Sloan’s monthly newsletter, but he’s a novelist with the best newsletter around, not an essayist pumping out regular pieces. I laugh whenever I read Andrew Ferguson and learn whenever I read Noah Millman, but I’d be lying if I said I keep up with everything they write. Maybe I should and maybe I will, but time is short and you can’t read everything.
That’s not even to mention friends and acquaintances whom I try to read as much as I’m able but don’t (yet) read enough of, like Matt Milliner and Kirsten Sanders and Chris Green and Kyle Williams and Ian Olsen and Alex Sosler and Alan Noble and Ben Crosby and James Wood. Or ballers like Onsi Kamel and Matt Burdette and Justin Hawkins and Rachel Roth Aldhizer who need to write more, more, more. Or once-yearly bangers like Matthew Rose and Patricia Snow and Zena Hitz. Or writers I hugely enjoy but can’t quite keep track of, like Ian Marcus Corbin and Matt Feeney and Samuel Goldman and David Samuels and David Polansky and Park MacDougald and Sebastian Milbank and Derek Thompson. Or old standbys I guiltily don’t read enough of, like Nicholas Carr and Mary Eberstardt and Jamelle Bouie and Oren Cass and Niall Ferguson. Or old lovable know-it-all academics like Philip Jenkins. Or old souls like Joseph Epstein and Stanley Fish, Peter Brown and Jackson Lears who’ve written so much for so long that I could barely make a dint in it. Or Ben Thompson and Jesse Singal and Ed West, who seem to write more daily than I can read in a week.
For those names that are on the list, therefore, their inclusion means that their author page is in my RSS feed, that I subscribe to their Substack, that I constantly scour the internet for their latest publication, and/or that I crack open a magazine the moment I see their name on the cover. To be clear, I don’t love or agree with all of them. A few might qualify as hate-reading, or at least facepalm-reading. Nevertheless I do find myself reading them—to see what they have to say, or to see how they say it. Everyone on this list has either style or substance, and many have both.
One last way to put it: These are the writers I’ve learned to read because the editors I trust continue to commission and publish them—Matthew Walther at The Lamp, Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis, Jay Tolson at The Hedgehog Review, Jon Baskin at The Point, Matthew Schmitz at Compact, Rusty Reno at First Things, Matthew Boudway at Commonweal, Anne Snyder at Comment, Peter Mommsen at Plough (all of which, by the way, arrive in my mailbox). These are the gatekeepers, together with their many fellow editors; they know what’s what, and most of what follows is just picking favorites from the murderer’s row of writers they have the regular pleasure of publishing.
Oh: And I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone. If your name is missing, I’m sure that someone is you.
Sam Adler-Bell – leftist journalist and freelance writer, hate-hate relationship with the Right, co-host of Know Your Enemy podcast, bylines at the New York Times and New York Magazine and The New Republic
Sohrab Ahmari – co-founder of Compact, author of Tyranny, Inc., bylines at First Things and The American Conservative
Matthew Lee Anderson – ethics prof at Baylor, founder of Mere Orthodoxy, writes The Path Before Us newsletter, author of Called Into Questions, former co-host of the Mere Fidelity podcast, bylines at Vox and First Things and The Dispatch
Helen Andrews – conservative journalist, former editor at The American Conservative, author of Boomers, bylines at First Things and The Lamp and Compact
Jon Askonas – politics profs at CUA, winner of the Emerging Public Intellectual award, bylines at Comment and Compact and The New Atlantis
Jon Baskin – founding editor of The Point, former editor at Harper’s, author of Ordinary Unhappiness
Richard Beck – psychology prof at ACU, long-time daily blogger at Experimental Theology, author of Hunting Magic Eels
Jeff Bilbro – English prof at Grove City College, editor of Front Porch Republic, author of Words for Conviviality
David Brooks – come on, let’s not pretend you don’t know who he is
Joseph Bottum – man of letters, poet, onetime editor of all the magazines, Catholic and conservative intellectual, author of An Anxious Age (a masterly book but criminally under-read), bylines at The Washington Free Beacon and First Things and Commonweal
Josh Brake – engineering prof at Harvey Mudd, wise guide to all things A.I., author of The Absent-Minded Professor newsletter
Elizabeth Bruenig – staff writer at The Atlantic, formerly at the New York Times and The Washington Post
Matt Bruenig – wife guy, lefty data policy guru, fellow Texan, righteously angry, founder of the People’s Policy Project, blogs at his website, bylines at Jacobin and The Nation
Sonny Bunch – film critic for The Bulwark, writes the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood newsletter
Timothy Burke – history prof at Swarthmore, author of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, writes the Eight by Seven newsletter
Tara Isabella Burton – novelist and essayist, former religion reporter for Vox, author of Strange Rites, co-writes The Line of Beauty newsletter, bylines at Comment and Commonweal and Plough and the New York Times and The New Atlantis
Christopher Caldwell – polyglot monarch of conservative intellectual journalism, contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, author of The Age of Entitlement, bylines at Compact and The New Statesman and The New Republic and National Review and The American Conservative and Financial Times and The Spectator
Isaac Chotiner – interrogative journalist at The New Yorker, author of the Q&A column, formerly of Slate
Phil Christman – marvelous essayist, equally(!) midwestern and leftist and Christian, English prof at the University of Michigan, author of How to Be Normal, writes The Tourist newsletter, bylines at Plough and Commonweal and Slate
Clare Coffey – freelance writer, bylines at The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review and Plough and The Bulwark
Tyler Cowen – economics prof at George Mason, columnist at Bloomberg, author of The Complacent Class, blogs at The Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations With Tyler podcast
Matthew B. Crawford – research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, writes the Archedelia newsletter, bylines at First Things and The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review
Theodore Dalrymple – retired doctor, conservative essayist and novelist, author of Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, bylines at The Lamp and First Things and City Journal
Freddie deBoer – last true Marxist, disbeliever in word counts, freelance writer on everything under the sun, author of The Cult of Smart, writes the Freddie deBoer newsletter, bylines at Compact and the New York Times and Harper’s and n+1
Michael Brendan Dougherty – writer at National Review, author of My Father Left Me Ireland, regular on The Editors podcast, bylines at The Week and the New York Times
Ross Douthat – my own personal op-ed spirit animal, columnist at the New York Times, film critic at National Review, author of Bad Religion, co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast
Christine Emba – staff writer at The Atlantic, author of Rethinking Sex, formerly at The Washington Post
Edward Feser – philosophy prof at Pasadena City College, long-time blogger, author of Philosophy of Mind, writes for First Things
Angela Franks – theology prof at St. John’s Seminary, author of Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy, bylines at First Things and Church Life Journal and Catholic World Report
John Ganz – lefty interpreter of the Right, author of When the Clock Broke, writes the Unpopular Front newsletter, bylines at The Nation and The New Statesman and The New Republic
David P. Goldman – right-Hegelian journalist of economics and China, writer at Asia Times, author of You Will Be Assimilated, bylines at Law & Liberty and First Things and Claremont Review of Books
Ruth Graham – religion journalist for the New York Times
John Gray – intellectual virtuoso and prolific analyst of the post-Christian West, author of Two Faces of Liberalism, bylines at The New Statesman and The Guardian
Emma Green – religion journalist at The New Yorker, formerly at The Atlantic
Paul Griffiths – retired theology prof at Duke, author of Decreation, bylines at Commonweal and (once upon a time) First Things
Allen Guelzo – historian at Princeton, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, author of Fateful Lightning, bylines at First Things and The New Criterion and Claremont Review of Books
Jonathan Haidt – psych prof at NYU, author of The Anxious Generation, writes the After Babel newsletter, bylines at The Atlantic and the New York Times
Shadi Hamid – columnist at the Washington Post, formerly at The Atlantic, author of Islamic Exceptionalism, co-founder of the Wisdom of Crowds website and podcast, co-host of the Zealots at the Gates podcast, bylines galore
Mary Harrington – reactionary feminist, author of Feminism Against Progress, writes the Mary Harrington newsletter, bylines at First Things and UnHerd
David Bentley Hart – irascible genius unbound by institutional shackles, Eastern Orthodox theologian, essayist, and translator, author of The Experience of God, writes the Leaves in the Wind newsletter, bylines wherever he damn well sees fit
Sara Hendren – design prof at Northeastern, author of What Can a Body Do? (an all-timer), blogs at her website, microblogs at ablerism, write (wrote?!) the undefended / undefeated newsletter, bylines at the intersection of the built and the physical environment
Wesley Hill – NT prof at Western seminary, author of Spiritual Friendship, bylines at The Living Church and First Things and Comment
Dan Hitchens – editor at First Things, sharp-tongued and unsentimental observer of all things Catholic, bylines at The Spectator and The Critic
Peter Hitchens – surviving brother of Christopher, irascible conservative scribbler, columnist at the Daily Mail, author of The Rage Against God, bylines at The Lamp and First Things and Compact
Alan Jacobs – English prof at Baylor, OG uber-blogger, my self-assigned mentor and archegos, author of The Narnian, blogs at The Homebound Symphony, bylines at The Atlantic and Comment and The New Yorker and The New Atlantis and First Things and Harper’s
Samuel James – editor at Crossway, author of Digital Liturgies, writes The Digital Liturgies newsletter
Paul Kingsnorth – ex-pagan novelist, poet, and essayist, my favorite convert to Orthodoxy outside of my brother, author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, writes The Abbey of Misrule newsletter, bylines at First Things and elsewhere
Phil Klay – Iraq veteran, novelist and essayist, author of Redeployment, bylines at the New York Times and The Atlantic and Commonweal
Ezra Klein – columnist at the New York Times, founder of Vox, author of Why We’re Polarized, host of The Ezra Klein Show
Austin Kleon – fellow Austinite and thief, author of Steal Like an Artist, super-duper blogger, also writes a glorious newsletter
Sam Kriss – unclassifiable essayist, logorrheic in a good way, writes the Numb at the Lodge newsletter, bylines at Compact and First Things and The Lamp and the New York Times
Bonnie Kristian – editor extraordinaire at Christianity Today, author of Untrustworthy, writes the Bonnie Kristian newsletter, bylines at The Week and The American Conservative
Peter Leithart – president of Theopolis, author of The End of Protestantism, writes for First Things
David Leonhardt – pandemic worldbeater, writer at the New York Times, author of Ours Was the Shining Future, writes The Morning newsletter
Yuval Levin – everyone’s favorite level-headed institutionalist conservative, senior fellow at AEI, editor of National Affairs, author of A Time to Build, bylines at the New York Times and National Review
Mark Lilla – humanities prof at Columbia, author of The Once and Future Liberal, bylines at the New York Review of Books and the New York Times
Michael Lind – grumpy gumshoe pro-labor conservative, author of Hell to Pay, bylines at Tablet and Compact and The Free Press
Damon Linker – radical moderate, poli-sci prof at UPenn, onetime editor of First Things, author of The Theocons, writes the Notes From the Middleground newsletter, bylines at the New York Times and The Atlantic
Matthew Loftus – doctor in Kenya via Baltimore, bylines at Mere Orthodoxy and Plough and Christianity Today and the New York Times
Zach Lowe – NBA journalist, formerly of Grantland and ESPN, former host of The Lowe Post podcast, currently and unjustly a free agent
Kate Lucky – editor at Christianity Today, bylines at The Point and Commonweal
Tim Markatos – film critic, writes the Movie Enthusiast newsletter
Eugene McCarraher – humanities prof at Villanova, author of The Enchantments of Mammon, byline at Commonweal
Daniel McCarthy – omnicompetent conservatism-explainer, editor of Modern Age, columnist at The Spectator, bylines at the New York Times and The American Conservative
Esau McCaulley – NT prof at Wheaton, author of Reading While Black, writes a New York Times newsletter, byline at Christianity Today, host of the Esau McCaulley podcast
B. D. McClay – simply one of the best essayists around, Swiftie explainer, lover of perfume and anime, has the world eagerly awaiting a book, writes the Notebook newsletter, bylines at The Hedgehog Review and the New York Times and The Lamp and The New Yorker and The Paris Review
Jake Meador – editor of Mere Orthodoxy, author of In Search of the Common Good, bylines at Plough and The Atlantic and First Things
Russell Moore – editor of Christianity Today, author of Losing Our Religion, bylines at The Atlantic and the New York Times, host of the Russell Moore Podcast
Wesley Morris – film critic (the best when he wants to be), formerly at The Boston Globe and Grantland, now art and culture critic for the New York Times, former co-host of various podcasts
Gary Saul Morson – literature prof at Northwestern, master of all things Russian, author of Wonder Confronts Certainty, bylines at First Things and The New Criterion and The New York Review of Books
Samuel Moyn – law prof at Yale, author of Liberalism Against Itself, bylines at the New York Times and Compact and The New Republic
Adam Nayman – film critic for The Ringer, author of The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together
Grace Olmstead – journalist, localist, memoirist, author of Uprooted, writes the Granola newsletter, bylines at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and Mere Orthodoxy and Plough
Louise Perry – journalist, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, writes the Maiden Mother Matriarch newsletter, bylines at First Things and The New Statesman
Brian Phillips – staff writer at The Ringer, formerly at Grantland, author of Impossible Owls, bylines all over
Jeff Reimer – editor nonpareil at Comment, bylines at Plough and The Bulwark
Adam Roberts – best SF writer alive, supposedly moonlights as a lit prof in London, author of The Thing Itself, writes the (new!) Substack-ships On Fire, Off The Shoulder Of Orion newsletter, byline the Internet
Alastair Roberts – digital lector, adjunct senior fellow at Theopolis, co-author of Echoes of Exodus, blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria, co-writes The Anchored Argosy newsletter, co-host of the Mere Fidelity podcast
Becca Rothfeld – book review critic at The Washington Post, editor at The Point, contributing editor at Boston Review, author of All Things Are Too Small, writes the a fête worse than death newsletter
L. M. Sacasas – best tech writer alive, associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, FL, author of 41 Questions: Technology and the Moral Life (forthcoming), writes The Convivial Society newsletter, writes elsewhere but really just subscribe ASAP
Fred Sanders – humbly wry polymath, theology prof at Biola, author of The Triune God, blogs at fredfredfred.com
Leah Libresco Sargeant – journalist and freelance writer, author of Arriving at Amen, writes the Other Feminisms newsletter, bylines at the New York Times and First Things and The Lamp and The New Atlantis
Matthew Schmitz – co-founder and editor of Compact, former editor at First Things, bylines at the New York Times and The Atlantic and The American Conservative
Ari Schulman – editor of The New Atlantis, steady hand at the scientism-critical ship, bylines at National Review and the New York Times
George Scialabba – my favorite living lefty essayist, author of Only a Voice, bylines everywhere but especially Commonweal and The Baffler and The New Statesman
Matt Zoller Seitz – film and TV critic for New York Magazine, editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com, my first-read for all things cinematic, co-author of TV (The Book)
Alan Sepinwall – TV critic for Rolling Stone, co-author of TV (The Book)
James K. A. Smith – philosophy prof at Calvin, former editor of Comment and Image, author of Desiring the Kingdom, bylines at First Things and The Christian Century
Justin Smith-Ruiu – the artist formerly known as Justin E. H. Smith, everything prof somewhere in Paris, author of The Internet is Not What You Think It Is, meta-writes The Hinternet newsletter, bylines at The Point and Tablet and elsewhere
Jonathan Tran – ethics prof at Baylor, author of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, writes for The Christian Century
Eve Tushnet – saint in the making, tragicomic Catholic queer writer and journalist, author of Tenderness, writes The Rogation Dragon newsletter, bylines at Commonweal and America and The Lamp and First Things
Matthew Walther – trad Cath prose stylist bar none, editor and founder of The Lamp, author of a biography of Saint John Henry Newman (forthcoming from Yale UP), bylines at the New York Times and First Things and elsewhere
Tish Harrison Warren – priest at local speakeasy Immanuel Anglican Church, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, writes (wrote?!) for Christianity Today and the New York Times
Audrey Watters – ed-tech Cassandra (and therefore to be trusted), author of Teaching Machines, blogs at Hack Education, writes the Second Breakfast newsletter
Myles Werntz – ethics prof at ACU, author of From Isolation to Community, writes the Taking Off and Landing newsletter, bylines at Mere Orthodoxy and Christianity Today
Alissa Wilkinson – film critic for the New York Times, formerly of Vox and Christianity Today and Books & Culture, author of Salty
Rowan Williams – Welsh wizard, former archbishop of Canterbury, author of On Christian Theology, bylines at First Things and The New Statesman and The Guardian
Andrew Wilson – teaching pastor at King’s Church London, author of Remaking the World, blogs at Think Theology, writes for Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition, sometime co-host of Mere Fidelity
John Wilson – lovable curmudgeon and devotee of books, former editor of the much lamented Books & Culture, bylines at First Things and The Hedgehog Review and elsewhere
Molly Worthen – history prof at UNC, recent convert to Christianity, author of Apostles of Reason, bylines at First Things and the New York Times and Christianity Today
My latest: bloodshed during Christmastide, in CT
A link to my latest column for Christianity Today.
My last column for Christianity Today this year is called “The Blood Cries Out at Christmastime.” It’s about the bloody feasts of Christmastide: Saint Stephen (Dec 26), the Holy Innocents (Dec 28), and the circumcision of Jesus (Jan 1). Here’s a preview:
Each of these ties bloodshed to Christmas—even the last one. This is not, however, how we usually mark the Christmas season, which is festive because it is a festival: a great party in honor of the birth of the King. Advent is for penitence; Christmas is for merriment (Matt. 9:15).
Yet there is a reason for the timing of these altogether bloody memorials. They are a stark reminder of the world into which Jesus was born, the world he was born to save. Even as we make merry, we will be less likely to trivialize the nativity of Christ when we remember that this child was born to die.
“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” of sins: so says Hebrews 9:22. Christmas may seem a long way from Calvary, but in truth it isn’t far at all. The Cross is already in view, whether for God (from eternity), for Scripture (as a narrative), or for us (who know the end of the story). Mary’s son is born to shed his blood for us. Even from the womb, this baby is bound for Joseph’s tomb. The circumstances of his birth and the saints honored during this season testify to that sobering truth.
Read the rest here. Merry Christmas!
My latest: why Christians oppose Euthanasia, in CT
A link to my new piece in Christianity Today arguing against euthanasia.
I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a piece called “Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia.” It is exactly what its title suggests. Here are two early paragraphs:
The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.
This ethical argument is very similar to the one Christians make about abortion. We could modify the oft-quoted line from Dr. Seuss—“A person’s a person no matter how small”—by substituting old or ill for “small.” (Other substitutions also suggest themselves: smart, abled, sexed, or hued.) To be sure, there are relevant differences between active euthanasia and, for example, removing a brain-dead person from life support. There are none, however, between administering fatal drugs and offering or prescribing them: Both directly facilitate the intended death of a patient under a doctor’s medical care.
Happy news: Letters to a Future Saint is the runner-up for CT’s Book of the Year!
The headline says it all. Read on for more details!
Yesterday Christianity Today published its annual book awards for 2024. Besides awards for genres like fiction and theology, there is an overall award for Book of the Year. This year’s winner was the great Gavin Ortlund’s What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church. And the runner-up?
That would be my own Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry. It won the Award of Merit for Book of the Year!
I’m grateful beyond words. My deepest thanks to the editors and to all who voted. This is not something I or anyone could have expected when I set out to write this book. I’m still in shock about it.
Ideally I’ll wake up soon, because next week there is a special live event celebrating the occasion: a conversation with Russell Moore, Ortlund, and myself, as well as other CT editors. It’ll run for about an hour on YouTube, beginning at 8:00pm ET, and featuring (I believe) questions from readers and subscribers. I’ll see y’all there!
My latest: on Jordan Peterson, in CT
A link to my review of Jordan Peterson’s allegorical commentary on the Torah in Christianity Today.
Yesterday Christianity Today published my review of Jordan Peterson’s new book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine. The title of the review is “Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God?” Early on I write the following:
The volume is, to put it mildly, an enormous undertaking—quite unlike Peterson’s self-help books. Running more than 200,000 words, it is a thematic and allegorical commentary on the law of Moses, especially Genesis and Exodus. It is gargantuan in every sense of the word: energizing and exhausting, brimming with ideas and asides, full of insightful connections and baffling conclusions, consistent in its viewpoint, maddening in its dodges, impressive in its ambition, and tedious, at times, in its sheer funereal solemnity.
Read the full thing here. For comparison, here is Rowan Williams in The Guardian with a rhetorically more negative but substantively similar assessment.
My latest: on providence and on the saints, both in CT
Links to my two latest columns for Christianity Today.
I have not one but two new pieces in Christianity Today this week (and another this coming Tuesday!).
The first is from the latest print issue; there it’s titled “Our Strength and Consolation,” online it’s called “The Consolation of Providence.” It’s a theological exploration of what the doctrine of providence teaches, what it’s there for, and what it’s not there for. It arose after political upheavals in July then was revised in October to be published after the election. It’s not really about politics; it is about God; it’s also about the uses and abuses of providence as a Christian hermeneutic for history (abusus non tollit usum).
The second piece is a review of Martin Scorsese’s new docuseries The Saints, which debuts in two days. I got to watch a couple episodes in advance—my first screeners! (I’m inching my way toward becoming what I’ve secretly always wanted to be: not a scholar but a film critic.) The title is “Saints Are Strange. Martin Scorsese Gets it.” And he does. Mostly I’m writing not about the technique or quality of the series but instead about the origins of sainthood in the early church and the question the saints pose to believers today.
As Tyler Cowen likes to say: self-recommending.
Stay tuned for Tuesday, when CT publishes my review of Jordan Peterson’s big new book on Genesis and Exodus, We Who Wrestle With God.
My latest: a plea to teach college students about God, in The Raised Hand
A link to my essay answering the question: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”
The Raised Hand is a Substack run by the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and edited by Daniel G. Hummel of the Lumen Center (Madison, WI) and Upper House (serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison). This school year they’ve been running monthly essays written by Christian academics asked to respond to the following prompt: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”
Yesterday they published my entry, titled “The Knowledge of God.” Here’s how it opens:
I am tempted to begin by saying that the first thing every university and college student needs to learn is how to read. But I’ve written about that plenty elsewhere, and you can’t throw a stone on the internet without hitting someone writing about the crisis of literacy on campus and in the public schools. Since I’m a theologian, moreover, there’s some low-hanging fruit (no pun intended) just waiting for me to reach up and take it.
Here's my real answer: If learning is about knowing, then every college student needs, through teaching, to come to know God. Another way to say this is that every student needs to learn how to pray.
Click here to read the whole thing. Thanks to Daniel for the invitation. And thanks to Sara Hendren, who already read and kindly boosted the piece. It was a fun one to write. Watch for a follow-up podcast conversation (sometime in the next week or two) that discusses the essay, also hosted by The Raised Hand.
My latest: a plea for screen-free church, in CT
A link to my new piece on screen-free worship for Christianity Today.
I’m in Christianity Today arguing for screen-free church; here are the opening paragraphs:
Some years ago, author Hal Runkel trademarked a phrase that made his name: screamfree parenting. It’s a memorable term because it captures viscerally what so many moms and dads want: parenting without the volume turned up to 11—whether of our kids’ voices or our own.
I’d like to propose a similar phrase: screen-free church. It’s a vision for an approach to Christian community and especially public worship that critically assesses and largely eliminates the role of digital devices and surfaces in church life. But the prescription depends on a diagnosis, so let me start there.
Consider the following thesis: The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.
My latest: a review of Rod Dreher, in CT
A link to my review of Rod Dreher’s new book on re-enchantment in Christianity Today.
This morning Christianity Today published my review of Rod Dreher’s new book (out today) Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. The title of the review is “Make Christianity Spooky Again”—just in time for Halloween!
Rod Dreher has some advice for you. First, put down your phone, close your laptop, and turn off the television. Next, begin to pray. Don’t pray just anything; recite the Jesus Prayer, preferably hundreds of times. Now you are positioned to begin your quest. The object of the quest is beauty. Seek to behold divine glory in the work of the Lord’s hands, whether in his creation, icons, or saints. If you have eyes to see, each of these is a mirror reflecting the light of Christ in a dark but not forsaken world.
In a word, you must become a “practical mystic.” If you don’t, you’ll lack the resilience to weather a godless, disenchanted culture. You and your children will lose hold of the faith. Like the apostle Peter, you will sink beneath the waters; unlike him, no one will lift you up. Or so argues Dreher in his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
Just wait till we get to the aliens. Read the rest here.
My latest: on fantasy and theology in The Christian Century
A link to my essay in The Christian Century on Tad Williams, Osten Ard, the genre of fantasy, and Christian faith.
In the latest issue of The Christian Century I have an essay on the divine comedy of epic fantasy, or as the editors titled it, “Gods Who Make Worlds.” It’s ostensibly a review of the final volume of Tad Williams’s quartet The Last King of Osten Ard, which is itself a sequel series to the original trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn—not to mention a prequel, a bridge novel, and a companion volume—for a total of ten books in this world. The name of that world is Osten Ard, and I use the glories of Osten Ard to think aloud about epic fantasy as a genre and its relationship to Christian faith.
Here are the opening paragraphs:
Three decades ago, Tad Williams published the final volume in the best epic fantasy trilogy written in English since The Lord of the Rings. Called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the series ran from 1988 to 1993 and totaled over a million words. Half of those words came in the final book—one of the longest books ever to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
There is no overselling the significance of Williams’s achievement: the biggest names in fantasy in the intervening decades all acknowledge his influence, from Brandon Sanderson to Patrick Rothfuss to Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin. (There is no Westeros without Osten Ard, Williams’s fictional world.) Yet, although Williams is hyper-prolific and widely admired, he has never had the success or name recognition of these other authors. No streaming service has yet broken the bank in adapting Williams’s magnum opus.
Why have these books sold well but never set the world on fire?
Three reasons come to mind…
Click here to read the rest. Thanks again to The Christian Century for letting me write about these books and this topic—a big ask, given my lack of qualifications.
My latest: on the social effects of church, in CT
A link to my latest column in Christianity Today on the social significance of the church for our time.
In 2016 David Brooks gave an address at the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Titled “The Cultural Value of Christian Higher Education,” the talk had a simple thesis: What every college in America is looking for can already be found at Christian universities across the country. In his own words:
You guys are the avant-garde of 21st century culture. You have what everybody else is desperate to have: a way of talking about and educating the human person in a way that integrates faith, emotion and intellect. You have a recipe to nurture human beings who have a devoted heart, a courageous mind and a purposeful soul. Almost no other set of institutions in American society has that, and everyone wants it. From my point of view, you’re ahead of everybody else and have the potential to influence American culture in a way that could be magnificent.
I happen to think he’s right about that, but in my latest column for Christianity Today, I use Brook’s remarks as a point of departure for thinking about another beleaguered American institution: the local church.
The piece is called “Worship Together or Bowl Alone”—a great title, kudos to Bonnie Kristian. Here’s an excerpt:
That’s why the instinct to meet our culture’s critique or ignorance of the church by downplaying its import is so misguided. Church is not an optional add-on to Christian faith. It is how we learn to be human as God intended. Indeed, it makes possible truly human life before God.
Church has what we need, the purpose and community and cultivation of virtue for which the rest of our culture is grasping in the dark. It’s right here. It’s nothing to be coy or embarrassed about. It’s nothing to apologize for. Church is what people are hungering for, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes we ourselves don’t realize it.
My latest: an essay and response in Restoration Quarterly
An overview of the latest issue of Restoration Quarterly, which is organized around and in response to an essay of mine on the past, present, and future of churches of Christ.
An essay of mine is featured in the latest issue of Restoration Quarterly (66:3). In fact, the entire issue is organized around it. Let me give a little back story.
Two years ago on the blog I wrote a series of reflections on the past, present, and future of churches of Christ. They got a lot of traction around this neck of the woods, and James Thompson, the editor of RQ, asked me to synthesize and elaborate the posts into a single essay. The result is called “Churches of Christ: Once Catholic, Now Evangelical” (pp. 133–44). It’s preceded by a brief reflection by Thompson on the “almost Catholic” ecclesiology of churches of Christ (pp. 129–32), then followed by three replies:
“A Response to Brad East” by Wendell Willis (pp. 145–51)
“Churches of Christ: Always Evangelical, Still Catholic” by John Mark Hicks (pp. 152–58)
“A Response to Brad East” by Paul Watson (pp. 159–62)
I in turn wrote a response to the responses (pp. 163–69). All around a good time was had by all. My response is followed by a proper scholarly article on the New Testament (authored, again, by Thompson), then book reviews. As it happens, a review of my own book, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context, is the first of this section.
It sort of feels like the Brad East Issue. I’m honored, humbled, and a little embarrassed.
Nevertheless it was a pleasure to engage such serious and pressing issues in a public forum with such thoughtful and generous thinkers and churchmen. My only regret is that while RQ does have a website it doesn’t have an obvious or convenient way to access current issues online or in digital form. Back issues are catalogued in ATLA but this one won’t be there for a while, at least from what I can tell.
I’m not in a position to share the whole issue with folks, but if you email me, I’d be willing to share a PDF of my essay and response. I’ll be curious to hear what folks make of my case, both regarding the absorption of churches of Christ by and into American Evangelicalism and regarding the precipitous institutional decline of the movement. The tone of the pieces isn’t doom and gloom, but it is quite sober and, if readers take it seriously, sobering. Which it should be, if I’m right.
My latest: on the late Albert Borgmann, in HHR
A link to my essay on the life and writings of the philosopher Albert Borgmann.
This morning The Hedgehog Review published an essay of mine called “The Gift of Reality.” It’s an extended introduction to and exposition of the life and writings of the late Albert Borgmann, including a review of his last book, published posthumously last January. Here’s a sample paragraph from the middle of the piece:
At the same time, while Borgmann may have been a critic of liberalism, he argued that “it should be corrected and completed rather than abandoned.” In this he reads as a less polemical Christopher Lasch or Wendell Berry, fellow democrats whose political vision—consisting among other things of family, fidelity, fortitude, piety, honor, honest work, local community, neighborliness, and thrift—is likewise invested in preserving and respecting reality. Such a vision is simultaneously homeless on the national stage and the richest fruit of the American political tradition.
My latest: on pastors’ reading habits, in Sapientia
A link to my essay on the role of fiction and poetry in pastors' regular reading diet.
I’ve got an essay in Sapientia called “The Reading Lives of Pastors.” The prompt was to reflect on Pope Francis’s “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation” and, more broadly, on why pastors should (if they should) include fiction and poetry as part of their regular reading diet. After clarifying at the outset that literature does not per se make you a better person, I write the following:
The fact of literature is in general a human good, in the sense that it is a sign of an advanced culture: symbol, narrative, myth, technology, writing, literacy, communication—these are to be celebrated, granting their capacity to be bent to any number of ends. But the act of wide reading in literature in and of itself entails nothing at all about a person. The voracious reader may be either selfish or selfless, vain or humble, vicious or virtuous, religious or secular, joyful or melancholy, full of life or obsessed with death, a treasured friend or a despised enemy, a cosmopolitan or a provincial, a sage or a boor. Hitler and Stalin may not have been men of letters, but they had men of letters for followers and apologists. The list of wicked writers and artists—who abused women, abandoned children, and passed in silence over the suffering of countless victims—is too long to recount.
It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. More of one does not necessarily lead to more of the other. They are neither directly nor inversely related. The desire for a cleaner, clearer correspondence between them is understandable, but utterly belied by the facts. Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?
Writing without a platform
Reflections on the possibilities of writing today without creating and maintaining an online "platform" via social media.
Is it possible? That’s what I’m wondering.
I can be a moralistic scold about social media—I’m aware. I’m also aware that, for many writers, social media feels like the one and only way to reach, much less build, an audience; to make a name for oneself in a time when anyone on earth can publish millions of words and just about no one pays for the privilege to read them.
I myself, for a time, benefited from social media. I was on Twitter from 2013 to 2022, with maximal usage coming in the span of years from 2015 to 2020. (Those dates are … interesting.) As it happens, I was ABD and dissertating from fall 2014 through spring 2017, then a newly hired professor starting later that fall. In other words, my Twitter usage peaked when (a) I was spending many hours daily staring at a laptop screen and (b) I was trying to get my life as a junior scholar and public writer off the ground. I got a handful of early writing gigs through Twitter and I made many more personal contacts through it, some of whom I still count as friends, colleagues, or nodes in my professional network.
That’s a long way of saying: I don’t have the luxury of strutting around on the moral high ground, looking down at folks building their platforms through X, IG, Substack, and YouTube. I did the very same thing, albeit to a lesser degree, and it undeniably helped my career, above all my career as a writer.
Hence the question. Is it possible, today, to write, to be a writer, without a platform?
A few thoughts.
First, credentials play a role. I was just telling an editor the other day that the academy is a backdoor into publishing books. My PhD opens doors. That’s a fact. Weirdly enough, since academic books aren’t bestsellers, it’s easier for me to creep my way into popular publishing than it is for someone who only wants to write popular books, since he or she has to make good from the jump. Or before the jump, in fact, through amassing followers and fans via “socials.”
Second, gender plays a role. I’ve written about this before, but the politics of women Christian writers was already complex before the rise of the internet and social media. Now it’s positively Byzantine. If you have a PhD, that’s one thing. If you’re employed in the industry—at a magazine, say, or at a publishing house—that’s another. If you just want to be a writer, though, your options for finding an audience and outlets are limited. If, further, you do not have a clear denominational or political tribe; and if, still further, you are not a culture warrior; and if, still further, you are not willing to post pictures of and share private information about your husband and children (assuming that you have them and that they are photogenic)—the circle just keeps getting narrower and narrower. I know exactly one contemporary female Christian writer who “broke through” without credentials, institutional home, tribal affiliation, or online platform, including Twitter. Otherwise one or more of these factors invariably determine the likelihood not only of getting written work into the world but of a sufficiently large audience finding it.
Third, expectations play a role. Almost no one makes an actual full-time living as a writer. Outside of those rare authors whose names we all know and who sell millions of books, writers either have a day job, or depend on a spouse’s income, or hustle like a maniac, or fundraise/crowdfund, or hit the speaker circuit, or live hand to mouth as a starving artist. Or they did one or more of these things for many years, probably decades, before reaching a threshold to just be able to pay their bills. This is not unjust. It’s just the way it is, and ever was it thus. Anger or resentment at lack of remuneration for the writing life is both a professional nonstarter and the product of a fantasy. A writer’s first rule is to live in the real world, and the real world doesn’t care about writers or what they write. The sooner one learns that, the sooner one can get started with what matters: the writing! Isn’t that what we’d be doing anyway, even if we knew we’d never get paid a dime?
Finally, the industry plays a role. This is the part where we get to complain. It’s common knowledge that trade presses use social media metrics as a gatekeeping mechanism. In plain speech, they ask first-time authors how many followers they have. If the answer is “a few thousand,” then they say “thanks for playing” and politely shut the door. If the answer is “zilch, because I’m not on social media,” then they laugh hysterically before slamming the door. (You can still hear them on the other side, doubled over in tears.) This is, it goes without saying, a new phenomenon, since social media is a new phenomenon. And writers eager to break through have followed these incentives to their logical conclusion: drumming up an online following by every means possible: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, Substack, Threads—you name it, they’re there. Posting, re-posting, replying, commenting, replying again, sharing, re-sharing, streaming, recording in the car, recording on the run, recording with the kids, walk and talks, live tweets, and more. Always on, extremely online, creating memes, mocking memes, revising memes: keeping the content coming, letting the spice flow. And eventually, with a pinch of success come subscription deals, and after these come sponsorships, and after these come ads. And before you know it, you’re celebrating the free swag you got in the mail or reading an on-air advertisement for skin cream.
How’d you end up here?
That’s the question you should be asking. That’s the question I’m trying to pose in my repeated missives against social media. It’s why, although I’m anti-anti-Substack, and I’m no longer stridently anti-podcast, I’m still hesitant about the knock-on effects of podcasts’ ubiquity, and on certain days, if I’m honest, I’m anti-anti-anti-Substack.
What I mean is: Substack is an ecosystem, and one of the ways it forms both writers and readers is to make every writer a digital entrepreneur hawking a product. Further, it encourages a relationship between writer and readership on the model of celebrity fandom. (After all, you gotta give the people what they want.)
Put these together and the model becomes that of the influencer. The podcasting live-streaming YouTuber with a newsletter and a Patreon is a single genus—the hustling entrepreneurial influencer with fans in the hundreds, thousands, or more—of which Christians, including writers, become only one more species. They are different from Kim Kardashian and MrBeast only in degree, not in kind.
I’ve written elsewhere that there are wise, thoughtful people doing this in ways I admire, in service to the church. They’re digital lectors taking the gospel to an entire generation of (to be frank; I love them) uncatechized functional illiterates addicted to digital technology, and God be praised they’re finding a hearing. I don’t retract what I wrote. But we are fooling ourselves if we don’t step back and see clearly what is happening, what the nature of the dynamic is. Writers are being co-opted by the affordances of newsletters, social media, and audio/visual recording and streaming in ways that corrode the essence of good writing as well as the vocation of the writer itself.
A writer is not an influencer. To the extent that participating in any of these dynamics is necessary for a writer to get started or to get published, then by definition it can’t be avoided. But if it is necessary, we should see it as a necessary evil. Evil in the sense that it is a threat to the very thing one is seeking to serve, to indwell, celebrate, and dilate: the life of the mind, the reading life, the life of putting words on the page that are apt to reality and true to human nature and beautiful in their form and honoring to God. Exhaustively maintaining an online platform inhibits and enervates the attention, the focus, the literacy, the patience, the quietness, and the prayers that make the Christian writing life not only possible, but good.
In a word: If writing without a platform is impossible, then treat it like Wittgenstein’s ladder. Use it to get where you’re going, then kick it over once it’s done the job.
Links: three reviews, three podcasts
Links to recent podcasts I joined as a guest and new reviews of one of my books.
I’ve fallen behind in my link updates, partly because of busyness, partly because the Micro.blog is so much easier for such things. But! Here are three podcasts I appeared on in the last few months, followed by a round-up of three new reviews of The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context.
Podcasts:
Holy C of E, “A Catholic View of Scripture” (July 1), available on Spotify and Apple. Lot of high Anglican content here.
The London Lyceum, “The Doctrine of Scripture” (July 10), available on Spotify and Apple. A rich conversation about Protestant approaches to and questions about Scripture.
Speakeasy Theology, “The Scandal of Theology” (August 12), available on Apple and Substack. A long, meandering, and wonderful chat with Chris Green about Robert Jenson, wicked theologians, and original sin. To be continued.
Reviews:
Joel B. Green, Interpretation 78:2 (2024): 174–75. Green writes that
this book serves both as a charitable and analytical reading of three distinct approaches to the use of the Bible in theology and as a formidable proposal for the importance of one’s understanding of the church for one’s interpretation of Scripture. The result is a welcome contribution to theological hermeneutics and to ongoing discussion of theological interpretation of Scripture. For those who imagine that their theological engagement with the Bible proceeds from text to doctrine, East offers an important corrective.
Keith Stanglin, Calvin Theological Journal 59:1 (2024): 191–93. Stanglin writes: “The excursus alone, with implications that transcend Yoder’s case, is a rather full and careful account of how” to engage work produced by Christians and other writers who, while alive, perpetrated great evil against others. Stanglin concludes: “Through it all, East effectively illuminates a significant link that sometimes remains obscure in theological discourse,” namely between ecclesiology and bibliology.
John Kern, Restoration Quarterly 66:3 (2024): 184–85. Kern writes:
Ultimately, this book is an exemplary work in contemporary systematic theology. It is historically attuned to the nuances of the figures that it treats. Even so, it evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, all while offering clear paths for bringing the best of their proposals together for a fuller vision. East never loses his constructive edge even while simply trying to get the figures right on their own terms. Even more, he does all of this while keeping his eye on the primary objective: to account for the divisions found among practitioners of [theological interpretation of Scripture]. He accomplishes this and so much more. Even tracing the lineage of these three theologians from Karl Barth’s influence would have been contribution sufficient to warrant a monograph, but East has found multiple ways to carry this conversation forward. The book is necessary reading for theologians and biblical scholars alike for the way it shows a point at once simple and deep: how one understands the church impacts how one understands the Bible as Scripture. It might not ultimately unify the differences between the different ecclesiological paradigms for bibliology, but East has helped theology in a major way by disambiguating the conflicts, showing where they truly originate.
Theological Amnesia: dreaming a book to write in my dotage
Using Clive James’s book as a springboard for imagining a similar volume dedicated to theological themes and writers from the twentieth century.
I remain enamored with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia.
By way of reminder, it’s an 850-page encyclopedia of twentieth century European letters, life, politics, and war, with diversions into Asia and the Americas as the occasion demands. It’s organized as a series of short essays on 112 writers, artists, musicians, dancers, comedians, actors, directors, generals, and politicians, ordered alphabetically by surname. There are maybe one or two dozen figures who antedate the twentieth century, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tacitus is premodern; I can’t recall if there is another). James selects the names entirely by personal preference, affection, and the importance he deems their role in the times—whether or not that importance is recognized by others. Most of the chapters are love letters: he wants his readers to love what he loves. But not all of them; Mao, Hitler, and Goebbels have entries, as do Sartre, Benjamin, Brasillach, and Kollantai. He despises them all. Another goal, then, is for readers to learn to hate what he hates, and why.
The themes of the work cluster around the twin disasters of Nazism and Stalinism, which is to say, the prelude to World War II, the nightmare of the Final Solution, and their contested half-lives in the Cold War. James celebrates the fragility and triumph of liberalism over communism and fascism. For “liberalism” read “humanism.” He wants his readers, whom he imagines as students, not to succumb to the forgetfulness so common to liberal cultures. Amnesia, in his view, is the precondition for political tragedy, because it makes the poison of ideology go down less noticeably. Memory is the antidote, necessary if not sufficient.
I noted in a previous post that, if all you had was James’s book, you would think religion was a failed experiment, universally accepted and proclaimed as such by World War I at the latest. He includes no explicitly religious writers and only a handful of Christians, whose faith, as he sees it, is utterly incidental to the value of their thought or the quality of their writing.
Although not all his subjects are writers, it is writing in which he is principally interested. This is a book about style: James admires no one whose prose lacks grace or verve; a unique voice on the page covers a multitude of sins. Each entry begins with a brief autobiographical introduction, then an epigraph from the artist, then an essay to match it. The essay is free to go in any direction it pleases, which sometimes means it isn’t about the name at the head of the chapter at all. But it is never off topic and never not a pleasure to read. That’s how he gets away with it. The book is a monument to his own vanity, and yet he pulls it off anyway.
Given how deeply personal such an endeavor must have been for James, I find myself imagining, as I come to the book’s close (I have around twenty chapters to go), what another version would look like. Scratch that: I wonder what my version would look like. It goes without saying that I could never write a book one tenth as good as this one. And for erudition and scope, only someone like David Bentley Hart could manage writing the book as it exists in my imagination.
That said, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Suppose the parameters were the same: An alphabetized encyclopedia of the century just past, centered on and after World War II, featuring mini-essays on more than a hundred authors, artists, and public figures, selected by whimsy and pleasure but centered around a determinate set of themes that would emerge organically as readers moved from name to name in a kind of spiral or web. But suppose, in addition, that the goal was to highlight religion, in particular Christian life and thought, in a supposedly secular century. Suppose, too, that the center of gravity moved across the Atlantic to North America, and instead of comedy, ballet, and journalism, attention was paid to film, sports, and philosophy. James’s interest in the lost world of prewar Vienna would be transmuted into contemplating the legacy of the American West and the subsequent export of American culture to the world. Further themes would announce themselves: the problem of atheism; the boredom of secularism; the rise of Islam; the irrelevance of public theology; the return of the convert; the renewal of monasticism; and the modern martyr, in all its varieties.
The secret of James’s selectivity is that, in considering only some, he sneaks in all the rest. He has no entries on Kant, Pound, Joyce, Auden, Berlin, Eliot, Heidegger, Solzhenitsyn, Costa-Gravas, Kissinger, Einstein, Shakespeare, Dickens, Stalin, Lenin, or Orwell, but look in the Index, and you’ll see plenty of page numbers for each of them. He makes no apologies for whom he does and does not include, since a potted history is the only possibility for a personal literary breviary such as this one. He’s certainly not choosing for race, gender, nationality, or ideological bona fides. Remember: this is a catalogues of his loves, together with a few of his hatreds, presented (with a straight face and tongue in cheek, neither somehow canceling out the other) as what’s worth remembering from the most violent century in human history.
If you don’t share my reaction—that the world needs more books like this one—I don’t know what to tell you. If you do share my reaction, read on.
*
The title of my imaginary book, naturally enough, is Theological Amnesia. It’s an antidote to an antidote. James has forgotten faith: not his own, but others’. It didn’t go underground. It was never relegated to the private sphere. He and his ilk just chose to ignore it, and given the genuine changes in Western societies since the Enlightenment, they could afford to do so. They did so, however, at their peril.
Two subtitles are competing in my mind: Authors and Artists from a Long Secular Century vs. Authors and Artists from the Long American Century. The former is clearer, in its irony, about the book’s subtheme, whereas the latter foregrounds the cultural focus. (Now I’m wondering whether I should add mention of martyrs, saints, and others besides. Hm.)
Either way, that’s the pitch. Below are the names.
A few words of explanation. First, the number ballooned from 112 to 150. That was only after nixing an additional 150. I do not know how James did it. It’s an impossible choice.
Second, I justified the larger number—for, I remind myself and you, dear reader, my completely imaginary book—by recourse to James’s word count. While some essays are 4-6 pages, many are 8-12 pages, and some are much more than that. All in all, his book totals around 350,000 words. If I wrote an average 2,200 words per entry, even with 150 names that would make for a smaller book than James’s. In the alternate universe where a more learned variant of myself attempts to write this book in my 70s … a publisher definitely goes for it. Right? (Let me have this.)
Third and finally, I did my best to keep to James’s temporal center of gravity. No one on my list is born after the mid-1950s, and any of them who are still alive today (a) are approaching their ninth or tenth decade of life and (b) became famous, having done their most important and influential work, in the closing decades of the last century. Everyone else on the list lived and wrote between the Great War and the fall of the Soviet Union—except, that is, for the handful of premodern authors (five or six) and figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (maybe a dozen) whom I felt compelled to include.
Without further adieu, then, here is the fake table of contents for my imaginary book. If I live long enough to be an emeritus professor, full of leisure time and surrounded by scores of grandchildren, don’t be surprised when I self-publish a thousand-page version of this idea, with copies distributed to friends and family only. I’ll leave it to history to decide whether it’s an unheralded classic or a painful exercise in imitation gone awry.
Theological Amnesia: Writers and Thinkers, Saints and Martyrs from a Long Secular Century
Thomas J. J. Altizer
G. E. M. Anscombe
Hannah Arendt
W. H. Auden
Augustine of Hippo
Jane Austen
James Baldwin
J. G. Ballard
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Karl Barth
Saul Bellow
Isaiah Berlin
Georges Bernanos
Wendell Berry
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Jorge Luis Borges
Peter Brown
Sergei Bulgakov
Roberto Calasso
John Calvin
Albert Camus
John le Carré
G. K. Chesterton
J. M. Coetzee
James Cone
Christopher Dawson
Dorothy Day
Simone de Beauvoir
Henri de Lubac
Augusto del Noce
Charles Dickens
Annie Dillard
Walt Disney
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Frederick Douglass
Clint Eastwood
T. S. Eliot
Frantz Fanon
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Ludwig Feuerbach
John Ford
Michel Foucault
Sigmund Freud
Mahātmā Gandhi
Billy Graham
Graham Greene
Ursula K. le Guin
Adolf von Harnack
Martin Heidegger
George Herbert
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Alfred Hitchcock
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Michel Houellebecq
Aldous Huxley
Ivan Illich
P. D. James
William James
Robert Jenson
Tony Judt
Franz Kafka
Søren Kierkegaard
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stephen King
Ronald Knox
Leszek Kołakowski
Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
Christopher Lasch
Stan Lee
Denise Levertov
C. S. Lewis
George Lucas
John Lukacs
Martin Luther
Dwight Macdonald
Alasdair MacIntyre
Malcolm X
Terrence Malick
Jacques Maritain
François Mauriac
Cormac McCarthy
Larry McMurtry
Herman Melville
H. L. Mencken
Thomas Merton
Mary Midgley
Czesław Miłosz
Hayao Miyazaki
Malcolm Muggeridge
Albert Murray
Les Murray
John Henry Newman
H. Richard Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr
Friedrich Nietzsche
Flannery O’Connor
Robert Oppenheimer
George Orwell
Yasujirō Ozu
Blaise Pascal
Paul of Tarsus
Walker Percy
Karl Popper
Neil Postman
Thomas Pynchon
Sayyid Qutb
Joseph Ratzinger
Marilynne Robinson
Fred Rogers
Franz Rosenzweig
Salman Rushdie
John Ruskin
Bill Russell
Edward Said
Margaret Sanger
Dorothy Sayers
Paul Schrader
George Scialabba
Martin Scorsese
Roger Scruton
Peter Singer
Maria Skobtsova
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Sophrony the Athonite
Wole Soyinka
Steven Spielberg
Wallace Stegner
Edith Stein
Leo Strauss
Preston Sturges
Andrei Tartovsky
Charles Taylor
Mother Teresa
Thérèse of Lisieux
Thomas Aquinas
R. S. Thomas
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Kennedy Toole
Desmond Tutu
John Updike
Sigrid Undset
Evelyn Waugh
Simone Weil
H. G. Wells
Rebecca West
Oprah Winfrey
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Karol Wojtyła
Franz Wright
*
Update (8/2): I should have thought to include a list of James’s entries, so that those unfamiliar with the book could see the names he chose, as well as compare them with mine. Apparently his list comes only to 106, not 112; perhaps I came to that number by counting the introductory and concluding essays. In any case, here you go:
Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg
Louis Armstrong
Raymond Aron
Walter Benjamin
Marc Bloch
Jorge Luis Borges
Robert Brasillach
Sir Thomas Browne
Albert Camus
Dick Cavett
Paul Celan
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
G. K. Chesterton
Jean Cocteau
Gianfranco Contini
Benedetto Croce
Tony Curtis
Ernst Robert Curtius
Miles Davis
Sergei Diaghilev
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Alfred Einstein
Duke Ellington
Federico Fellini
W. C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
François Furet
Charles de Gaulle
Edward Gibbon
Terry Gilliam
Joseph Goebbels
Witold Gombrowicz
William Hazlitt
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Heinrich Heine
Adolf Hitler
Ricarda Huch
Ernst Jünger
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Leszek Kołakowski
Alexandra Kollontai
Heda Margolius Kovály
Karl Kraus
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Norman Mailer
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Golo Mann
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Chris Marker
John McCloy
Zinka Milanov
Czesław Miłosz
Eugenio Montale
Montesquieu
Alan Moorehead
Paul Muratov
Lewis Namier
Grigory Ordzhonokidze
Octavio Paz
Alfred Polgar
Beatrix Potter
Jean Prévost
Marcel Proust
Edgar Quinet
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Jean-François Revel
Richard Rhodes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Virginio Rognoni
Ernesto Sabato
Edward Said
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre
Erik Satie
Arthur Schnitzler
Sophie Scholl
Wolf Jobst Siedler
Manès Sperber
Tacitus
Margaret Thatcher
Henning von Tresckow
Leon Trotsky
Karl Tschuppik
Dubravka Ugrešić
Miguel de Unamuno
Pedro Henríquez Ureña
Paul Valéry
Mario Vargas Llosa
Evelyn Waugh
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Isoroku Yamamoto
Aleksandr Zinoviev
Carl Zuckmayer
Stefan Zweig