The Nightstand

Up From Hell: Timothy G. Patitsas’s The Ethics of Beauty

Look at what has sometimes happened to Christian architecture in America, for example; tragic declines in quality are matched by the inability of people to even notice how bad it all is.

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.

Twenty-Six Theses on Textual Technologies

Language is primarily a relational (rather than a representational) technology. Words articulate our relationships to God, other humans, our environment, and even ourselves.

Prickly Porcupine on Natural Law: A Review of David Lyle Jeffrey’s...

Hence this book is something special: a new set of Christian fables on natural law that do more than teach simple morals or seek to modify children’s behavior.

Human Dominion in Kipling’s Just So Stories

Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.

Restoring the Long Run as a Practice of Virtue

As she engages ultimate questions about human life, Little models the pursuit of virtue and the concomitant wrestling with vice involved in this pursuit.

A Rural White American’s Reflection of White Rural Rage: Resentment is...

Despite Trump’s own divisive rhetoric, he makes rural Americans feel heard in ways neither majority party has in decades. Any politician or scholar who actually wants to address the root causes of polarization needs to reckon seriously with this reality.

Seeing the Stars: A Review of The Anxious Generation

If the sky clears above us, we won’t suddenly find ourselves saints. But at least, perhaps, we’ll be able to see the stars.

Who Has Children Anymore Anyway?

Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

How to Have a Baby in the Apocalypse

It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world apart, the idea that humans are in charge.