Articles categorized as The Christian Life
How pornography makes us less human and less humane
Pervasive consumption of pornography dulls the mind: if we delightedly give ourselves over to falsehoods, we lose our ability to sort truth from fiction.
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.
Prudence > Courage
The language of prudence has an archaic, outmoded quality that reminds us more of Puritan naming practices than a virtue that is indispensable for our lives together.
A tale of two deaths
Whatever theological claim we might make about death, many of us are gripped by an inescapable instinct that it poses a challenge to us, that it raises a question about the meaning of our lives to which we must provide an answer.
The lavishness of friendship and a world beyond vows
What should we make of the idea of ‘covenented friendships’?
On disrespectable Christianity
Many of the most hopeful and best parts of evangelicalism the past fifteen years have been encompassed by an incipient desire for respectability.
The ordinary is not comfortable: Richard Stearns’ “radical” misreading
Ordinary moments intersect with eternity, where the meaning of our lives hangs. Focusing on the mundane isn’t a call to comfort: it’s a terrifying call to remember the judgment which we stand beneath.
The vocation of writing when words are cheap
The value of sentences as a raw material has dropped. How should those who love words respond?
Blue like orthodoxy: when Donald Miller met G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton is magical because he kept his sense of humor while using it at the expense of his intellectual foes, and in the defense of dogmas.
Here come the radicals!
David Platt, Francis Chan, Shane Claiborne, and now Kyle Idleman are dominating the Christian best-seller lists by attacking our comfortable Christianity. But is ‘radical faith’ enough?
Marijuana, coffee, and our medicated age
The moral nature of any artificial stimulation or technological intervention into the body’s processes depends upon our understanding of the human body’s nature and purpose, and its meaning within creation.
Intellectual empathy and overcoming disagreement
One way to cultivate such common ground in our own local communities is through what some of called “intellectual empathy,” or the decision to enter into a person’s way of the seeing the world and look along with them.
Our delightfully strange world
On a first read, though, Orthodoxy almost appears not to be a book at all, but rather a long string of glittery sentences, each threatening to undo our reading by drawing us into the world anew.
Friendship, opposition, and Chick-Fil-A
Ethical consumption doesn’t entail these sorts of symbolic actions, and while it might be right to support the restaurant there’s also something to not letting the right hand know about the left when we’re doing what we ought.
The trouble with talking about our “identity in Christ”
The positive content of our “identity in Christ” rarely gets filled in. Instead, we are left with a void, an empty hole that can neither guide nor instruct us in how we should live in the world.
How to think about social networking in churches
What do we do with virtual fellowship?
The christian consumer
Even ethical consumption stands in danger of being co-opted by the logic of brand identity and consumerism, and having its power muted as a result. Yet that does not excuse us as Christians from deliberating carefully about how to faithfully consume in a consumerist world.