Christianity
Story Stream
Martin Luther King's Vision Anchored in His Christian Faith January 22, 2025
It was the last speech of his life, the speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave on April 3, 1968. It was a radically Christian speech in, of all places, a church: Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, central headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. Lik...
The New Iconoclasm January 20, 2025
In the historical struggle over images—iconomachy (Eikonomachía)—there is no doubt that in the Christian West the iconophiles were victorious. That said, Byzantine defenders of holy representation could not possibly have foreseen how, and to what ext...
Here’s Stanley! January 20, 2025
In 1966, at 38, Stanley Kubrick told a friend he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie.” The idea may have stemmed from childhood fears. Kubrick wasn’t particularly brave in his youth. His father, Jacques Leonard Kubrick, was a doctor, and young...
The Unbearable Burden January 17, 2025
You already have an opinion on this man. You may like him, you may dislike him. You may have a long list of gripes about things he has said or things you imagine he has said: “He claimed that dragons are real! He wanted to give bride-slaves to incels...
Believe for Your Own Sake, Not for "the West" January 17, 2025
Some years ago, I dated somebody who matched with me on a dating app because I identified myself as someone to whom religion is important. He had specifically searched for someone to whom religion is important. Back then, I was a relatively-new Chris...
Public Life Beyond Politics January 16, 2025
What is public life? In the leadup to the election, the evangelical author Nancy Pearcey tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer “a privatized Christianity.” At a major conservative ...
How to Storm and Save an Ivory Tower January 07, 2025
Not until quite recently did American colleges cease being free expression zones. After University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom sounded the alarm with his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and...
Wokeness Was Never a Religion January 07, 2025
At the height of “wokeness” (or “social justice” if you like), writers like Helen Lewis and John McWhorter speculated that it might be “our new religion,” supplanting Christianity at a time when society was becoming increasingly secular....
A Space Novel for Earth Lovers December 17, 2024
I’ve never been a space guy. Earth, like Robert Frost said, seems to be “the right place for love.” While I appreciate the ambition of those of us who want to travel to Mars, I’m not attracted to the idea because I’m not desperately in love with the ...
Motherhood After Christianity December 17, 2024
Does history bend toward progress or does it bend toward chaos? In her new book Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, the classics scholar Nadya Williams argues that any society without a gui...
Understanding the Times December 16, 2024
WORLD’s Book of the Year in the Christian nonfiction category is Aaron Renn’s Life in the Negative World (Zondervan, 272 pp.). Renn’s division of the experience of American Christians into the positive, neutral, and negative worlds has proven to be a...
Decline of Evangelicalism Helped Elect Trump December 09, 2024
A whopping 80% of evangelicals voted for President-elect Donald Trump in 2024. But behind that headline number, the dramatic fall in these Christian’s cultural influence played a much more profound role in Trump’s victories than evangelical voters di...
A Review of Kevin Vallier’s 'All The Kingdoms of the World' November 26, 2024
For nearly a decade, a strain of political theology known as “integralism” was ascendant. Kevin Vallier’s All The Kingdoms of the World (2023) tells the story of integralism’s rising star and explores the limits of its case for illiberal political ru...
Ready for Weirdness November 20, 2024
Is life worth living? “It depends on the liver.” Thus did William James pose the question, as well as the “jocose” answer that was currently circulating, when he addressed the Harvard Young Men’s Christian Association in 1895. He then immediately put...
Richard Price’s New Novel Is Short on Drama November 19, 2024
We first meet Anthony Carter in a barroom, and the first thing he does is tell a lie. “I went there too,” he says to a woman he’s vaguely interested in picking up, referring to her Fordham Rams sweatshirt....
Alive and Kicking November 18, 2024
Toward the end of her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” on the schism in contemporary literature between realism and conceptual fiction, Zadie Smith lists a few authors to be found in the middle. “At their crossroads,” she writes, “we find extrao...
On Classical Education November 14, 2024
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? And what has the Department of Education to do with the classical education movement? For Tertullian, the second-century church father, the question was whether Hellenic culture and philosophy might divert Christ...
Is Technology Destroying Marriage? November 13, 2024
I am a happily married man who’s been with the same woman since college. I am a devout Christian who tries every day to abide by the scriptural injunction to sanctify our family with self-sacrificial devotion. My wife and I have two beautiful childre...
I'm Glad He Won November 12, 2024
This is my grandfather. His name was Victor. He was an auto mechanic, a gardener, and a fiddler who won Smithsonian awards for folk music. He was also a proud American and a World War II veteran. A devout fundamentalist Christian, he applied to be a ...
The Exploitation of Compassion November 08, 2024
For a book about the perils of empathy’s excesses, Allie Beth Stuckey’s newly released Toxic Empathy (2024) is rife with respect for empathy itself.Christian compassion, Stuckey acknowledges, is a positive force in our daily lives. When we see a frie...
The Influence of Sedona Prince November 06, 2024
At twenty-four years old, Sedona Prince is starting her seventh year of college basketball, but she has only played in seventy games. Last year, her first at Texas Christian University, she averaged roughly twenty points, ten rebounds, and three bloc...
Auden’s Island November 06, 2024
When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to se...
Becoming by Beholding July 31, 2024
In the earliest decades of Christianity, before the Bible had been written, what did Christians depend on for soul formation and ideas about the person of Jesus Christ? Imagination....
Make Christianity Strange Again July 30, 2024
Many American Christians are bracing for doomsday. They fear that rising rates of religious disaffiliation will lead to the decline of Christianity in America. Some demographers predict that if current trends hold, Episcopalians will cease to exist b...
The War on Genius July 29, 2024
What is a novel, or any work of art, but the product of its time, of commerce? What is it but another colorful consumer unit, to be slid dutifully on a shelf or hawked through the internet? I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope...
