Alex Sosler

Alex Sosler
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Alex Sosler is Assistant Professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College and Assisting Priest at Redeemer Anglican Church in Asheville, NC. He is also author of Learning to Love: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage (Falls City Press) and editor of Theology and the Avett Brothers (Fortress/Lexington).

Recent Essays

Marriage Will Kill You (And That’s Good)

You can either have a hard marriage or an unhealthy marriage. These are your options. And Key not only made me feel normal, but he made me want to live more faithfully and with more grace in the marriage that I have. For, as he says, leaving marriage will change you but perhaps maybe not in the ways you should. Staying married will also change you, perhaps in the ways that you need to change.

Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life

I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular question. I’m not against finding your why. I just think it’s overrated. Particularly in suffering or pain, I’m not sure “why?” works.

Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts

Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts

Education as Pilgrimage

"We seem to be born homesick, and that homesickness is meant to lead us into a life of pilgrimage.” Walker Percy Black Mountain,...

Attentional Arts and Beholding Beauty

Contemplation of God is paying attention to what demands one’s attention—more than information discovered or expression felt. Contemplating art can be a means, a sort of preparatory practice, of contemplating the Beautiful One from which all beauty is derivative.

An Education That Turns on Affection

Alex Sosler compares online and in-person education. Paradoxically, when we embrace the limits of our embodied existence and learn with and from particular classmates in a particular place from a particular teacher, affections develop. Imagination stirs.

The Liberal Arts for Loss and Lament

The main posture of a liberal arts education is slowing down, rest, seeing. But if we just train students to only strive, reach, stretch for something more, then suffering will come as a wasteful, meaningless interruption.

Ted Lasso as Parish Priest

Ted Lasso offers a compelling model of a good parish priest: this fictional football coach exemplifies how to lead others with care.

Sacred Reality: The Augustinian Vision of Goodness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

Robinson presents us with an encounter: a participatory, embodied experience; a blessed and broken reality; the sacraments. And from this encounter, we receive courageous eyes to see the precious things that have been placed in our hands and to honor them accordingly.

The Instrumentalization of the Liberal Arts

The liberal arts aren’t for some utilitarian purpose; they’re to free young people to love rightly.

Failing in a Pandemic

The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students, they may even say I’m boring.

The Classroom as a Welcoming Space

If we have all the knowledge in the world but have not love, the apostle Paul says, then we’re as annoying as a banging cymbal. It’s no wonder students wouldn’t want to listen to us.