Too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.
The postmodern critique is not aimed at metanarratives because they are really grounded in narratives; on the contrary, the problem with metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic g...
Baptism signifies a radical reordering of the social world in Christ precisely because it signifies that the priesthood is open to all
You can’t just think your way to new hungers. While Pollan and Berry may have successfully recruited my intellect, their books couldn’t change my habits. Such rehabituation was going to require a whol...
We often hear of brand loyalty, even brand devotion. But do people really worship brands? Is consumerism really such a liturgical experience? It may not be as far fetched as you think. In a recent stu...
We need to think further about how a Christian understanding of human persons should also shape how we teach, not just what we teach.
We (allegedly) haven’t imposed a normative vision of human social arrangements except the maxim Be autonomous. The result? Erosion of family stability (especially for the poor) and widening inequality...
This is why Luther and Calvin still understood themselves to be catholics. While they might have been railing against the abuses of Roman Catholicism, they also understood themselves to be heirs of th...
This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it’s a book Augustine has written about you. It’s a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It’s a travelogue of the heart. It’s a road trip wit...
This coupling of market forces and the crowd’s demand for publicity means that everyone dreams of monetizing their Instagram feed. And that effectively becomes the ethos of a society.
There is a specter haunting our secular age, the spectre of meaninglessness (p. 717) — which is, in a sense, a dispatch from fullness. And because this won’t go away, but rather keeps pressing and pul...
The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our telos—our goal, our end. But the telos we live toward is not something that we primarily know or believe or th...
The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our
The Supper is a gracious communion with a forgiving God; but it is also a supper we eat with one another, and that too will require forgiveness.
The Eucharist is our model of the eschatological order, a microcosm of the way things really ought to be.[105] Thus it is a normative meal: by showing us a foretaste of how things ought to be, the pra...
Radner rightly presses us to recognize that pursuing the common good with gospel integrity requires both a healthy state and an ecclesial anchor. For some of us, that will mean rethinking our tendency...
Liturgy, as I’m using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation....
In other words, the public practices of the empire are idolatrous practices because embedded in them is a very different telos, a rival version of the kingdom. The political refuses to remain penultim...
In contrast, right here in Christian worship we see a very different understanding of the good: humanity and all of creation flourish when they are rightly ordered to a telos that is not of their own...
In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin makes this point with a Tocquevillian accent: in many ways the ideal of a pluralistic liberal society has lived off the borrowed (formative) capital of illiberal...
