Articles categorized as Essays
Love Is Your Master: Love, Betrayal, and Repentance in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona
Unravelling love, betrayal, friendship, and repentence as found in the rarely performed Shakespearean play Two Gentlemen of Verona.
The New Evangelical Scandal
Whether Democratic efforts to win over evangelicals are successful in the long term remains to be seen. But their devotion of resources and attention to evangelicals and other faith-based communities suggests they see an opportunity to make inroads that did not exist previously.
Our culture of reading and the end of dialogue: an essay
Confronting a text whose meaning is initially obscure to us and being impelled to press onward, to work and think and wrestle, gives us the sort of discipline and training that genuine wisdom demands.
Behold! What Shakespeare’s words on mercy can teach us about Internet shaming
Our culture is risking a new, unrelenting pursuit of justice far more “Puritanical” than the Puritans.
Your doctrine of creation is too small
In the order of questions, how the world came into being, or whether the world is good, or what responsibilities we have toward the world are all derivative upon the questions of what the world is and how it is to be understood in reference to the Creator.
Douthat’s tepid defense of traditional marriage
Ros Douthat’s endorsement of traditional marriage is about as tepid as you’ll find, down to being nearly incoherent. He wants to talk about the ideal, but then let it go when it becomes socially inconvenient. He’s worried—rightly—about being called a bigot, but attempting to straddle both sides won’t satisfy anyone.
The aesthetics of sports
Both bad officiating and good officiating take their meaning–like everything else–in the eschaton, in the final resolution of the game, both in itself and in its relationship to its broader cultural context.
Chesterton’s orthodoxy as the antidote to modernity
Chesterton is the anti-Nietsche—a poet-philosopher who understands that unless truth exists, the enterprises of art and beauty are rendered meaningless.
The Gospel and proper political engagement: reflections on the atonement and Christendom
The secular space that the exists between now and the eschaton is the space in which the Church enacts its mission, which is a mission both to people and to the nations and societies that they compose. This allows us to approach politics from a different vantage point—one that is integrated into and reflects the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on the cross.