Call & Character, season 2 | episode 5, April 5, 2021
Consoling the Heart
Fare Forward, Issue 11 It may sound like I’m trying to smuggle classical conceptions of rationality into contemporary notions of emotional awareness: Brené Brown cloaked under Aristotelian virtue ethics or Augustinian moral psychology. Perhaps I am doing some smuggling. But I do think that wisdom applied to action trains our unformed and unruly desires. It invites us […]
The Problem with À La Carte Politics
Christianity Today, March 2021 A few months before the 1996 election, a stack of voting guides showed up at my nondenominational church in suburban Chicago. The guides contained candidates’ headshots and positions on a series of hot-button political issues, including abortion, homosexuality, and congressional term limits. Our church was one of approximately 125,000 to receive […]
Podcast: On Racism and the American Church: Jemar Tisby
Call & Character, season 2 | episode 1, January 14,2020 On January 6, white nationalists stormed the US Capitol—many of them carrying banners with phrases like “Jesus Saves” and “Make America Godly Again.” Various symbols and icons could be seen in the swarming crowds, including a ten-foot crucifix that rioters placed in the middle of […]
Podcast: On Art and Faith: Makoto Fujimura
Call & Character, December 15, 2020 The British poet Edward Thomas once wrote an exquisite little poem in which he described a simple, towering plume of smoke rising from a train as “so fair it touched the roar with silence.” In my own encounters with the art of Makoto Fujimura, our guest today, I’ve been […]
The Liberating Arts Winter Roundtable
On the challenges facing the liberal arts tradition, with Jessica Hooten Wilson, Jeff Bilbro, and Noly Toly (TLA, December 14, 2020).
Between Pandemic and Protest: The future of the liberal arts in higher education
COVID-19 has been apocalyptic for higher education, presenting a cliff made still taller by a powerful protest movement. Both events have intensified pressures long squeezing the survival of the liberal arts as a viable educational model, highlighting both the urgency and the elusiveness of moral formation in a twenty-first century education. How might those invested in preserving […]
Monuments Can Be Destroyed, but Not Forgotten
Christianity Today Online, September 2020 In the Hebrew Scriptures, stone monuments are earthen witnesses to a sacred covenant. When Jacob contractually maneuvered himself out from under his father-in-law Laban, he set up a pillar in the highlands of Gilead. It was supposed to be a reminder of a legal separation, but the fragility of the […]
Sermon: Little Girl, Arise
Morning Prayer at the Chapel of the Resurrection, Valparaiso University
Sermon: A Friend Regained
Candlelight Evening Prayer, Valparaiso University, February 9, 2020 John 21:1-19 Good evening. Thank you for having me here at this beautiful Candlelight service. I wasn’t given a specific lectionary text to preach on, but was asked to find a passage that would help us reflect meaningfully on the future. So, against the grain, I chose […]