Joshua Pauling is vicar at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Charlotte, NC. He is author of the book Education's End: Its Undoing Explained, Its Hope Reclaimed and co-author with Robin Phillips of the book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine. He is contributing editor at Salvo, columnist at Modern Reformation, and has written for a variety of other publications including Areo, CiRCE, Forma Journal, Front Porch Republic, Logia: A Journal of Lutheran of Lutheran Theology, The Lutheran Witness, Mere Orthodoxy, Merion West, Public Discourse, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, Touchstone, among others. He is a frequent guest on Issues Etc. Radio Show/Podcast. Josh also taught high school history for thirteen years and is now a classical educator and runs his own business making custom furniture and restoring vintage machinery. He studied at Messiah College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University, and is continuing his studies at Concordia Theological Seminary. He and his wife Kristi have two children.
Joshua Pauling
Articles by Joshua Pauling
Steel-Manning the Amish: The Wisdom of Communal Discernment
What the Amish understand perhaps more than we do is the necessity of maintaining and protecting domains of embodied human agency in our lives.
From Building Things to Building Institutions
What struck me most in reading the book was the role of risk-taking and personal leadership in an organization’s founding phase, and the necessity of consolidating and institutionalizing its vision,…
Reality’s Bite: Responding to the Reality Privilege Argument
Are those who question transhumanist progress or Metaverse predictions just knee-jerk Luddites whose visceral reactions are worthy of only a patronizing pat on the head for not seeing their own…
Your Brains are in Your Hands: Doug Stowe on Forming Mind, Hand, and Culture
Stowe’s book is both timeless and timely. Our physical embodiment as human creatures is always essential, but it is especially so amid increasing digitality. The last two years of pandemic-related…
What are Hands For? Technology, Hands, and the Wounds of God
Christ touches. With his hands he heals the sick, opens mouths, unstops ears, blesses the children, and raises the dead. And ultimately it is the marks in Christ’s hands that…
The Classroom as Sanctified Space: Human Formation away from the Screen
For the sake of human formation and flourishing, it is essential to carve out sanctified spaces of peace and refuge away from the mesmerizing pull of screens.
When Innovation Runs Out: The Vindication of Maintenance
The Innovation Delusion goes a long way toward demystifying and destigmatizing the ordinary yet essential work of maintenance.
Jacques Barzun’s 1937 Critique of Race-Thinking
On the heels of a consequential election, and the accompanying commentary demonstrating the continued pervasiveness of race-thinking, Barzun’s message of honoring each human individual’s value while recognizing our shared common…
Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
Human driving requires unending mutual predictions and constant accommodations for each other. It is in such experiences that we end up with something meaningful for life in the physical world…
The Allure of Old Tools and Vintage Machinery: Memory, Meaning, and Making
Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator.
Teddy Roosevelt’s Prophetic Speech: The Perpetual Relevance of “The Man in the Arena”
Roosevelt delivered an oration he entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” but which the world would soon come to call “The Man in the Arena.” Every fresh reading of the speech…
Coming Home, COVID-19 Style: A Moment to Reconsider the Natural Family
The lengthy drift from family to individual as the primary social unit carries an alluring promise of autonomy and individualism which sounds so good, so freeing, but it comes up…
The Super Bowl Spectacle Sends Mixed Messages about Women
What was on display in the halftime show was not a celebration of sexuality or empowerment for women. It was an elevation of instinct.
Recapturing the Real: Physicality, Imitation, and Tradition in a Digital World
Our educational approach should include the validation of physicality, the imitation of the master, and the celebration of tradition.