Anyone with an email account knows the flutter of daily inbox arrivals ranging from the most trivial to the most vital. For someone just publishing the results of something like fifteen years (really a life’s worth) of reading and thinking in a book called Ars Vitae (The Art of Living), discovering an email one day…

“All of this presupposes that we are creatures capable of observing, sustaining, and living suspended in the fragile beauty of the world around us, within us, and beyond us” (p. 358, emphasis added). With these words, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn concludes her argument calling for a recovery of inwardness in response to a pervasive culture she terms…

I’ve always been amused by the fact that the nineteenth-century art movement Impressionism got its name from a satirical review of Claude Monet’s painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise). Louis Leroy created a fictional dialogue between observers of the painting, having one of them say that “a preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more…

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae is just the kind of reasonable, non-polemical book that our society needs today. Equally adept at diagnosing the problem and offering cogent solutions, Lasch-Quinn balances well the theoretical and the practical, the external and the internal, the philosophical and the theological, the pagan and the Christian, the academic and the popular,…

In Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn canvasses five ancient schools of practical-philosophical thought. Contemporary intellectual and cultural trends, she contends, bear various relationships of ancestry and family resemblance, and in some cases of shared nomenclature, to these ancient schools and can be usefully…

In Book Ten of his Confessions, Augustine makes the seemingly incontrovertible claim that everyone wishes to be happy. “We hear the word ‘happiness,’ and all of us admit that we strive for the thing itself” (10.29). There’s not a person in this world, Augustine says, who doesn’t have some intuitive sense of the meaning of…

I have not written much, or for very long, but this Sapientia book symposium is easily the greatest honor my work has ever received. I am very grateful to Joey, Dan, Hannah, John, Rachel, and Russ for reading, challenging, and extending my argument, and for Matthew Wiley and Joey Sherrard for putting this together and…

On a crisp Autumn night a few years ago, our little church started a new institution in the life of our community: monthly neighborhood parties. In the months leading up to that night, we had built a beautiful relationship with our local jazz club, who agreed to host us. We spent weeks of valuable staff…

Should someone claim the label “gay Christian?” It is not a question that Alan Noble takes up in You Are Not Your Own. Yet it is a question same-sex attracted disciples get asked frequently, and one that consistently features in articles, webinars, and panels on LGBT+ questions. It can be asked kindly, curiously, and sometimes…

In 1979, Richard Lovelace analyzed what it meant for local churches to pursue strategies of spiritual revitalization in his book Dynamics of Spiritual Life. Without being formulaic, he gave a paradigm of what are (1) the preconditions for spiritual renewal to occur (a grasp of a knowledge of God, ourselves, the depth of sin, and…

In his new book You Are Not Your Own, Alan Noble talks a lot about sex. He talks about sexual identity. He talks about the ethics of sex work. He talks about the ennui that can undermine married sex. And he talks about pornography. (He talks about pornography a whole lot.) To be fair, one…

Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own is an appeal to reclaim the anthropological sensibilities of the Heidelberg Catechism by way of a trenchant analysis of what it feels like to live in the malaise of the modern “inhuman” world. For as far-ranging as Noble’s book is, again and again I found myself being profitably…