Alex Sosler

Alex Sosler
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Alex Sosler is Assistant Professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College and Assisting Priest at Redeemer Anglican Church in Asheville, NC. He is also author of Learning to Love: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage (Falls City Press) and editor of Theology and the Avett Brothers (Fortress/Lexington).

Recent Essays

An Invitation to a Different Story: A Review of Letters to a Future Saint

Christianity is not merely a doctrine to believe but a life to live and embody. East understands this and invites Future Saints into a different imagination and way of life.

Stability as Spiritual Formation

“They see us as deeply lonely people,” Barry told Fred, “and one of the reasons we’re lonely is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world and have called this ‘progress.’” Maturity in Christ is not escape but presence.

Marriage Will Kill You (And That’s Good)

You can either have a hard marriage or an unhealthy marriage. These are your options. And Key not only made me feel normal, but he made me want to live more faithfully and with more grace in the marriage that I have. For, as he says, leaving marriage will change you but perhaps maybe not in the ways you should. Staying married will also change you, perhaps in the ways that you need to change.

Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life

I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular question. I’m not against finding your why. I just think it’s overrated. Particularly in suffering or pain, I’m not sure “why?” works.

Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts

Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts

Education as Pilgrimage

"We seem to be born homesick, and that homesickness is meant to lead us into a life of pilgrimage.” Walker Percy Black Mountain,...

Attentional Arts and Beholding Beauty

Contemplation of God is paying attention to what demands one’s attention—more than information discovered or expression felt. Contemplating art can be a means, a sort of preparatory practice, of contemplating the Beautiful One from which all beauty is derivative.

An Education That Turns on Affection

Alex Sosler compares online and in-person education. Paradoxically, when we embrace the limits of our embodied existence and learn with and from particular classmates in a particular place from a particular teacher, affections develop. Imagination stirs.

The Liberal Arts for Loss and Lament

The main posture of a liberal arts education is slowing down, rest, seeing. But if we just train students to only strive, reach, stretch for something more, then suffering will come as a wasteful, meaningless interruption.

Ted Lasso as Parish Priest

Ted Lasso offers a compelling model of a good parish priest: this fictional football coach exemplifies how to lead others with care.

Sacred Reality: The Augustinian Vision of Goodness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

Robinson presents us with an encounter: a participatory, embodied experience; a blessed and broken reality; the sacraments. And from this encounter, we receive courageous eyes to see the precious things that have been placed in our hands and to honor them accordingly.

The Instrumentalization of the Liberal Arts

The liberal arts aren’t for some utilitarian purpose; they’re to free young people to love rightly.