The Nightstand

Awakening to Virtue: Confessions of a Well-Read, Unlucky Good Girl

Both Prior and Gibbs agree that ultimately virtue orients us toward one end, to “love God and enjoy Him forever.” Loving God is difficult; it too requires our attention in a culture that is constantly distracting us. And while virtue brings about human flourishing that can be observed from the outside, loving God requires us to remember who we are on the inside. It is the place where we are to be good alone … in the presence of One.

Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We...

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 and life in community.

Heighten the Mystery

With California burning, Antarctica melting, and a death-toll spiraling, we’re left with a looming question: Can a people walking in darkness yet be made to see?

Fidelity to the Truth in an Illiberal Time, on Rod Dreher’s...

I encourage readers to give Dreher a fair hearing and consider the evidence he offers in support of his arguments. The phenomena he cites are real and disquieting, and he should not be dismissed out-of-hand simply because he forecasts a world far darker than many of us believe could possibly emerge.

The Sinister Agenda Behind “The Economy”: A review of We Built...

Continuing to base economic and government models around a reductive view of homo economicus will trap us within the inhumane “reality we have made.”

Marilynne Robinson’s Jack and the Need to be Forgiven

Much of the novel reads like this sentence—the internal struggle of someone who wants—not forgiveness, nor salvation, really, but rather to not need to be forgiven, to not require salvation nor redemption, to maintain what dignity is possible, given irremediable forsakenness.

The Cauldron of Degrowth

In a nutshell, Degrowthers make a bold case that a future worth living is not about doing more with less, it’s about doing “less with less,” and it’s not at all hard to sense an idea whose time has come.

Contemporary Christian Fiction: The Example of Joshua Hren

In the Wine Press gathers together a host of rough-edged stories of American Christians living in the rise and fall of both Evangelical Catholic and Protestant American Christianity, which arose in the twilight of the Clinton era and peaked during the confluence of religious fervor and patriotism under the White House of George W. Bush.

The Art of Living an Examined Life

If human beings flourish from their inner core rather than in the realm of impact and results, then the inner work of learning is fundamental to human happiness, as far from pointless wheel spinning as are the forms of tenderness we owe our children or grandchildren.

Poor Little Lamb

Colin Phelps is not the first to discover a graced thing in college: it’s the unchosen self-knowledge that is most liberating.