The Super Bowl is Political, Just Not in the Way You’re Thinking

This post is inspired by a post I saw the day after the Super Bowl on X. The post comes from a user named Elijah Schaffer. I'm not familiar with him or his work, but apparently he's a conservative journalist who writes for The Gateway Pundit. The point of the post, I think, is that...

You Might Have a Problem That a Therapist Can’t Fix

Before I dive in, a mundane confession of my own uselessness. I think it is good for the soul to regularly be in situations where you are reminded of your own inadequacy and the adequacy of others. I'm a college administrator and professor. I have a terminal degree. This makes me useful for certain tasks...

In Praise of the Same Old Thing

New Year's Day is a strange holiday. It's perhaps the only holiday that is about preparation more than celebration.1 The celebrations of the new year are only felt on January 1, not experienced. January 1 is about preparing ourselves physically and mentally, maybe even spiritually, to emerge from the holiday haze and reenter our normal...

Yes, Audiobooks Count

As the year is wrapping up, nerds everywhere are tidying up their Goodreads lists from the last year. Sure, most people don't care what books you read last year. They don't care how many pages you read. They have no appreciation for the outrage that Goodreads counts Augustine's City of God with equal weight as...

6 Types of Atheists

Over the weekend I listened to the first several episodes of a fantastic new podcast by Justin Brierley called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. I strongly recommend the podcast. In the podcast (which is inspired by a book with the same title), Brierley discusses the state of Anglo-American atheism today. The big takeaway...

What Are Your 20s For?

Every fall when I give my "welcome to college" talk to our incoming class of first-year students, I tell them that they will likely experience more changes over the next ten years than any other ten year period of their lives. Many of them will graduate from college, get their first "adult" job, fall in...

When Bad Ideas Are Worse Than Wrong

I was doubly shocked by what I was seeing. The videos and testimonies started as a trickle on social media and quickly became an overwhelming deluge. Young people attending a peace concert killed by the hundreds as armed gunmen lobbed grenades into cramped bomb shelters. Terrified teenagers, their whole lives in front of them, executed...

Theology in the Wild

(What follows is the manuscript of a talk that I recently gave at the Spire Conference for church leaders in Nashville, TN.) Those who put together this conference asked me to speak on the topic "Theology in the Wild." I should confess the very first question that came to mind was that if you actually...

Generations

I have some skepticism when it comes to personality tests. They are often pseudo-scientific attempts to quantify the inherently unquantifiable. Imagine the absurdity of reducing an individual, in all of her wonderful complexity, to a number or a series of letters or a Hogwarts House. Personality tests are exemplifications of what Jacque Ellul called "technique"...