I'm trying to keep my blog somewhat "apart" from current events. I'm trying to talk about deeper structures, more permanent features, long-term realities. God knows we have enough attention to...

A good small Sunday sermon for you can be found in this nice piece.

Complexity, maturity, reality. In an ideal situation, they do emerge, at least loosely associated with one another. And this...

Time to make the donuts.

A piece about mathematicians' chalkboards, as media for how they work out their ideas.  A nice set of pictures, too.

I was never a serious watcher of Sta...

"Neoliberalism" is a big word that people use for a lot of things, and vanishingly rarely as a complimentary or even neutral term.  I tend to think it is a pretty bad analytic tool, but it does...

Sobering:

“Today, therefore, neither party represents the same types of places it did just 10 years ago. As such, the Democratic Party is now anchored in the nation’s booming, but highly...

John Gray always takes things too far, but the basic lesson he takes away from Tom Holland's book Dominion seems absolutely right to me:

Dominion presents a rich and compelling history of...

I just found this piece (in the NYT Style section, which is itself telling) and it seems to me a bit depressing.  Is one way that "writers" are able to survive in this economy, by selling the idea o...

This small article in the Washington Post today made me think.  These kind of crises in the Evangelical world suggest something of the tensions that evangelical elites, especially younger...

Great story about Baldwin v. Buckley, and incredibly powerful clip. “I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the...

This piece is saying what some of us have been saying for a few years, and what responsible scholars (like Hout and Fischer, whom she mentions in her piece and I do in mine) have been suggesting for...