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…

This is not just an academic question for me. As I am writing this essay, I am serving as the primary caregiver for my 88-year-old father who is suffering from multiple co-morbidities, including dementia. The frailties and limitations of our embodied condition are part of his (and, therefore, my) daily experience. Since I am a…

A Review of James K. A. Smith, The Nicene Option James K. A. Smith has been in the business of “translation” for many years. He translated Jean-Luc Marion’s important book The Crossing of the Visible from the French (1991), helping English readers gain access to Marion’s profound phenomenology as he applied it to painting, icons, and…

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…

In the introduction to The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times, Charles Mathewes writes, “Hope has had a hard time since September 11. But things were not so good before then either.” Now over a decade from the publication of those words, we could replace the fall of the Twin Towers with any…

Let me begin by thanking each of the contributors for their thoughtful entries in this conversation; I thank Professor Haidt as well for a book well worth interacting with. His other commitments precluded him from responding to these contributions, so I will wrap things up, trying both to exercise sympathy with Haidt’s project and to…

In this essay I will focus on ways in which The Righteous Mind challenges Christians. Haidt’s empirical observations of a matrix of six moral “taste buds” coheres with Biblical ethical material—the Bible has a great deal to say about care, fairness (both equality and proportionality), loyalty, authority, sanctity and liberty. Haidt suggests that different groups…