About 1/3 of the way through the film Apollo 13 Ed Harris, playing the role of Mission Control Flight Director Gene Kranz, advises his staff on how best to help the Apollo astronauts currently stranded in space and with only a very small chance of making it home. He says they need to work the problem, not make things worse with guesses, and then think in terms of "status." Then he asks, "what do we have on the spacecraft that's good ..read more

One of the core concepts we have returned to regularly in our diagnostic writing about this cultural moment is that online networks have supplanted in-person institutions as the dominant forms of social belonging for most of our neighbors. One of the problems that follows from this is that online networks actually are better at spreading negative emotions than positive emotions. We are more incentivized to act online when we encounter content that makes us feel rage, fear, anxiety, and so on as opposed to when we encounter content that causes us to feel content, calm, or happy ..read more

Early on in the post-liberal discourse, a good friend warned me about what he assured me the trajectory of that conversation would be. "This isn't going to go the way you think it will," was the gist of his concern, though he expressed it more tartly and made liberal use of this GIF any time I made confident declamations against "liberalism ..read more

As the great dechurching continues and Christian institutions fail and falter, those of us who remain and desire to see Christianity flourish will need to build new institutions to advance this work and carry it on after we are gone. Unfortunately, during times of fear and turmoil, it is very easy for us to build institutions founded on vice rather than virtue. When this happens, we construct institutions like Cain or the people of Babel. Such cities have their origin in human vengeance (Gen 4:24; Nah 3:1 ..read more

content warning: discussion of sexual assault ..read more

In what has become a hackneyed cliche to use for graduation speeches, Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is often read as the pinnacle of personal choice. I’d like to think about it in terms of imaginative formation. Here it is ..read more

The present “crisis of masculinity” has its origins in ongoing confusion about what a man is. It also involves the contemporary angst of men, especially young men,with a sense of lack of purpose or vision they have for their lives. What does it mean for a young man to “make something” of himself? Is there a reliable and general script men can follow that will guide them towards maturation and meaning ..read more

Several years ago the Lincoln City Council passed a so-called "Fairness Ordinance" that was... fairly bonkers. We wrote about it at the time. The short version is that the ordinance was chiefly concerned with "public accommodations," which it defined, essentially, as being any place in the city aside from private homes. It also defined violations of the ordinance as being any "speech" that gave "offense" that took place in a public accommodation. So, per the letter of the ordinance, a pastor reading Romans 1 in the pulpit on Sunday morning would be in violation of the city's Fairness Ordinanc ..read more

David Bahnsen, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life (New York: Post Hill Press). 208 pp. $24, cloth.  I sometimes tell people, when recommending that they read A Severe Mercy, that they should know the book presents as a love story but, in reality, it is actually a conversion story. If you understand that going in, your whole experience of the book will be better. A similar comment might apply to David Bahnsen's Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. If you take the book to be a reflection on work, you're only getting part of the story. Really the book is a vindication of ..read more

In the Screwtape Letters, the senior tempter Screwtape admonishes Wormwood about the danger of tempting humans with pleasure. He tells his devilish understudy, “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. . . He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.” C.S. Lewis’s imagined letters from Screwtape coaching Wormwood on how best to tempt an individual so that he will not fall into the hands of “the enemy” (i.e. Christ) communicate powerful insights int ..read more