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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

After another brutally contentious presidential election, once again, friends, family, and neighbors struggle to understand how it is possible that their loved one could be so benighted as to vote for, and perhaps even offer active support, for one candidate or the other. Most of us have seen more than an article or two offering…

The classical doctrine of creation has suffered much since the twentieth century. While Bruce Ashford and Craig Bartholomew are willing to speak of the “travails and glories” of the doctrine in this period, it is evident that they are concerned with the former. Moltmann’s panentheism and process theology’s notion of a di-polar God, for example,…

“The divorce of the natural and moral universes is perhaps the worst legacy of the Enlightenment, and the most urgent challenge facing modern humankind.” So said British theologian Colin Gunton 35 years ago. One might reasonably claim that little progress has been made over the last quarter century. Ideas like meaning, value, and purpose are…