This morning I’m in CT with a review of Clare Morell’s new book The Tech Exist: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smart Phones.
TL;DR: Buy the book, read it, get a copy for your pastor, drop free copies from airplanes. It’s so good.
This morning I’m in CT with a review of Clare Morell’s new book The Tech Exist: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smart Phones.
TL;DR: Buy the book, read it, get a copy for your pastor, drop free copies from airplanes. It’s so good.
The latest Know Your Enemy episode on Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement is excellent. It’s Matt and Sam at their very best.
MBD: “Summers Before Screens." Painful on so many levels for this fellow tech-skeptic dad.
My brother Mitch is in Christianity Today with an article on unredeemable technology. Give it a read!
Myles Werntz reviews Andrew Root’s new book. One line that stuck out to me (it’s Myles, not a quote from the book): “God finds us not in the pursuit of happiness but in the shambles of our failure.”
Mere Fidelity is back!
Call it Mere Fidelity 2.0. And I’ve joined the lofty ranks of pod co-host along with OG hosts Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and Andrew Wilson as well as fellow newbies James Wood and Joe Minich.
The first episode of the relaunch is out today. We talk about the new pope and mostly gang up on curmudgeonly Presbyterian Derek in our yearning for a reunified church. Check it out on Spotify or Apple.
Reading Brian Phillips is always a pleasure, including about shows I’ll never, ever watch, like The Rehearsal.
I’ve had reason to read this 2007 essay on MacIntyre by Hauerwas many times over the last two decades, and MacIntyre’s passing occasioned another re-read. It’s Hauerwas at his very best.
I’ve come to see that early Christian theology is more rabbinic than Platonic. Better: It involves a rabbinic use of Platonism. Early in the third century, Origen, one of the greatest Christian commentators on the Bible, composed On First Principles, the first work of systematic theology in the Christian tradition. The opening sentence states that this marvelous treatise has “no other source but the very words and teachings of Christ.” If we take Origen at his word (and we should), then On First Principles is an exercise in speculative midrash.
On Amazon, The Church: A Guide to the People of God is currently marked down to $7.50. That’s one-third of the original price! It’s a couple large coffees at Starbucks! It’s the cost of a used book, but it’s new! Buy a bunch for your family, friends, and church today!
Read Michael Legaspi’s review of Elaine Pagels’s new book on Jesus and Mark Bauerlein’s review of Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain.
Matt Zoller Seitz, at the peak of his powers reviewing Fountain of Youth:
It is the “Citizen Kane” of second-screen entertainment. Every frame rewards inattention.
And:
It’s packed with the kind of “dialogue” that David Mamet once described as “here we go to the bottom of the staircase that we’re trying to get to the bottom of.”
And:
James Herbert edited the movie, perhaps with the mix of deep annoyance and honor-bound diligence of a lifeguard doing CPR on someone who dove into a pool fully clothed and drunk.
And finally:
The goal isn’t to get you to lean in and become fascinated, but to stay just involved enough that you don’t close the app. You know how stuff on streaming platforms auto-plays on your the second screen after you’ve dozed off? They count it as having been “watched.” It’s a scam that would be bitterly amusing if it weren’t contributing to the degradation of what use to be entertainment. Perhaps eventually, digital technology will bring things full circle, and load up Apple with plagiarized LLM and Gen AI prompt-slop that no person actually made, to be not-watched by sleeping audiences all over the world.
I’m sorry to say that Adam Nayman is right about M:I–8.
That said, the two main action set pieces—in the submarine and on the biplanes—are without peer or parallel. You can’t breathe. Nor can you believe this man with a death wish really did it all himself. Worth the ticket price just to see him do it.
At the end of 700 pages of a two-volume work on Scripture and doctrine in the church fathers—at the end of a prestigious sixty-year career of service to both academy and church—approaching the close of her ninth decade of life—this is the way Frances Young concludes: with a simple, heartfelt doxology addressed to the Trinity, her life’s work and love and object of devotion. May her tribe increase!
I’m in The Public Discourse this morning with a sequel to my “Goldilocks Protestantism” essay in First Things. It’s called “Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism."
Hearts & Minds is having a 20% sale on new books about the church, including my own—it’s marked down to $15. Go buy a copy today!
Read Casey Spinks answer the question: “Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?"
Read Justin Hawkins' annotated guide to Nicaea on the 1700th anniversary of the first ecumenical council.