Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and...
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in a community where one knows and is known,” and where its boundaries include soils, waters, plants, and animals.
Walking alongside Wisdom: A review of Learning the Good Life
Lying on a bed at 2:00 AM idly flipping through a book while texting a friend isn’t likely to be a transformative experience. Treating education as a hoop to jump through to secure a job, make money, and consume leads to practices serving that end. The authors in this book will challenge our perceptions about what learning is for.
Flowers and Dust: Summer in The Great Gatsby
The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told us at the beginning of the novel, the empty space around Gatsby’s dream is made up of that same dust, those same ashes.
Perspectives of History: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High...
Turmoil is present throughout Dick’s world, and this is clearly reflected in each of the three characters discussed here. Tagomi, Wegner, and Childan’s lives are greatly influenced by events precipitated by others, and each responds in a different manner.
The Scholarly Lewis: A Review of The Medieval Mind of C.S....
Baxter articulates two central features of the Medieval Model: the ordered and iconic nature of reality. Reality is not a chaos waiting for us to impose structure on it or make it what we want; it is rather a cosmos with a nature independent of our wishes, demanding us to conform to it and pointing us back to its Creator.
What in the World is the World?
Perhaps it’s the nudge you need to reconsider your little actions and the grand narrative which guides and orients them. And, perhaps, you’ll go out to confront the real in all its strange mystery and strain to hear the music and the summons that invite you to re-embed yourself in the real, to feel awe at all that’s been given to you, and to consider living a life of creaturely gratitude and creativity.
Agrarian Theology and its Limits: A Review of Agrarian Spirit
I am not faulting Wirzba for failing to include these examples of more conservative Christians who practice agrarianism. But I would ask whether his theology of agrarianism, written in an academic context, can speak to and challenge the church at large.
Defining Race: A Review of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial...
In their newest incarnation, American racial preferences are advertised to the public as compensating for prior pro-white discrimination and promoting racial diversity. Problems of definition persist under the new order of things, however. There is still no central race bureau, but there is no shortage of guidelines and administrative decisions trying to find the boundaries between preferred races and non-preferred ones.
The Only Bonds to Be Found: A Review of The Most...
An imagination like his, fictions like his – born from affection – may not provide us with data or answers but may help us feel “somehow more substantial and less troubled, characters more permanent.” And they may show us how we can help the land we find underfoot become a beloved, well-cared-for place. Stewart’s book goes a long way towards helping us see the world, and its people, the way Stegner hoped we could.
Hunting, Hearing Loss, and Environmental Ethics: A Review of A Catechism...
Brown stresses the need to pay attention to “what God has said, and nature is his most primordial and exoteric word”; after all, within this word, human nature is situated too. But “[l]ess and less in our time and place do we hear the most primordial of God’s words—the song, one might say, of creation’s fundamental realities”; “[w]e have lost the ability to speak and understand the language of creation.” Where might we look for a remedy to this hearing loss?