Casey Spinks

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Casey Spinks is a Ph.D. student in the religion department at Baylor University. A native of Baton Rouge, he earned his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy and religious studies at Louisiana State University. His academic work has appeared in the book Taking Kierkegaard Personally and the journals International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy & Theology and Perspectives in Religious Studies. And he has written essays for The Imaginative Conservative, Christianity Today, and VoegelinView. He is also an avid birder and occasional carpenter.

Recent Essays

Learning to Love the Brazos with John Graves

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With some little local knowledge now in mind, I too may, day by day, attune myself to the Way, How ever imperfectly I go about What I am striving to do.

Cormac McCarthy’s Sorrow of Creatures

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Are dreams only dreams? Or are they God’s gifts of the unconscious which we still fail to know? McCarthy lets these questions remain, and no argument or worldview can answer them. So, we are left waiting for God to say something, anything, as His answer.

A Rant Against Satellite Photos and in Defense of Starlit Skies

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In our day, we cannot ourselves see the heavens; we can only see pixelated images of heaven produced by computer screens. In this respect, we already live in virtual reality.

Forest Rebel Cinema

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With this love and materiality, these two films express the pure reality to which their protagonists are so devoted. In a world of frictionless unreality, endless abstractions, and tepid and timid loves, these films impress upon us resistance, difficulty, attachment, and the dire risk that attachment brings

A Real American Philosopher

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Bugbee’s thought suggests a defiant confidence that the things themselves can and do reveal themselves to us in their independence, if only we would have the patience to let them.

Watching Movies and Wondering about Metaphysics in an Anxious Age

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Casey Spinks muses on zombie shows, Pixar movies, Scorsese films, metaphysical realism, and the philosophical fate of modern culture in his review of Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st-Century Film and Literature, by Anthony Wachs and Jon Schaff.

Take to the Land: A Strategy for Third Parties

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Even if ‘land’ is less important than actual vote share, this map does point to a very real issue at the heart of American politics: namely that majorities, specifically local majorities, matter very much in our democracy.

The Promise and Forgiveness of Hillbilly Elegy

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Hillbilly Elegy is indeed political, but in a deeper sense, entangled as it is in the webs of broken promises and repeated forgiveness.

Notes on a Mad Hunter’s Morality

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The act of hunting makes hunters guilty—and so it makes them moral.

Weird Christianity’s Aesthetic and the Tyranny of Values

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So long as old Christianity is treated as an aesthetic or an alternative lifestyle or a set of values contending against alienated modernity, it will never be anything more than a therapeutic commodity. But if we allow it to reckon with us, we may find ourselves snared in the grasp of “something real.”

The Knight of Faith: Franz Jägerstätter’s Hidden Life

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In the midst of whatever trials come to us and whatever revelations do not, we are still called to serve, to do good, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And to believe in the voice that may not choose to speak to us, to hold fast to the goodness given to our beloved but unseen by everyone else—that is the vocation of faith for many of us.

Hannah Arendt on Labor, Work, and Dwelling—and Plastic Straws

Casey Spinks -
An appreciation for labor and the cycle of nature is not itself enough for sustainable human dwelling. We also need a re-appreciation of the durability and independence of the works we produce.
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