During this election season, pundits, pastors, as well as politicians have spoken often about the character of our nation. Last month in The Atlantic, David Brooks wrote about cultivating moral character in the midst of collapsing trust, and more recently Pastor John Piper wrote about the importance of leaders as influencers, observing that the calling…

With the ability to captivate our hearts, awaken imaginations and paint pictures of what it means to be a good person, stories help form (and malform) character and influence behavior.For a recent and thoughtful account of how character is formed consciously and unconsciously, see James KA Smith’s Cultural Liturgies books series: Imaging the Kingdom, Desiring…

Recently, I visited a Japanese garden with my students. It was a good way to socially distance while enjoying some embodied, face-to-face experience with each other. Mostly, we talked about Japanese garden design: for example, how it integrates Buddhist and Shinto architectural elements, how it highlights precious natural objects (such as exceptional trees or rocks),…

One of the first questions I ask students in my Christian Legal Thought seminar is what they expect Christianity might have to say about law. A common answer is that Christian teaching can provide guidance about what the legal rules should be.  Many of my students have been taught the importance of having a Christian…

Jenell Paris’ post this week introduces a new book for which she wrote the introduction Christian colleges and universities vary one from another, but share a central commitment to Christ, and to teaching students in a “Christ-animated” manner. As an anthropologist, I rely on interdisciplinary study to deepen my knowledge of Scripture so that I…

Mark Zuckerberg wants it. Elon Musk says we need it because of robots. Joe Biden rejected it. Ben Sasse thinks we should be talking about it. Milton Friedman sort of liked it, and even Charles Murray thinks it may be a good idea. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke favorably about it as a potential…

Failing to recognize who we really are, image bearers of God (Gen. 1:26), causes us to lose our moral way. The Christian virtue of gentleness is a perfect test case. For hundreds of years, due to the Christian moral tradition, men and women alike were encouraged to be gentle (as reflected in the use of…

When I was 26 years old, the night before my water baptism, I prayed and asked the Lord to reveal to me my calling. He impressed this verse strongly on my spirit: “The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to…

I ended my last post suggesting “the relevance of cinema to Christian orthodoxy.” What exactly does this mean? On one level the answer is easy: award-winning films have portrayed dedication to Christ with respect, such as The Mission (1986, Roland Joffé) and the recently streamed A Hidden Life (2019, Terrence Malick), about a martyred Austrian,…

For three centuries, the novel was the literary genre that expressed and shaped the modern condition more than any other literary form. A long prose narrative that focused on the ordinary life of an ordinary person, the early novel was the perfect form to express the newly emerging autonomous, ambitious individual. Of course, since the…