Articles

In the balance, Hayhoe’s book makes a positive contribution to the climate conversation. The book encourages dialogue rather than hectoring. In that sense, though the targeted topic is climate change, Hayhoe’s advice is good for any sort of persuasive argument.

Frank Mulder is preaching the same Gospel. Pictures of Frank Mulder make him look like he could be a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, on a bicycle, planting sycamores instead of apple trees, helping people, one by one, break free from the threefold madness of money, planning, and crowds.

My least-favorite bumper sticker of all time reads, "If you're not outraged you're not paying attention." As a remedy for this sort of dopamine-fueled attitude, the author suggests that we refuse to bow to the media outrage machine.

Here are three novels about three places in the world. Each conveys not just a perfunctory setting but a web of topography, livelihoods, pastimes, and lore. And in each the experience of arriving at that place endures in memory and self-understanding.

Holding up a sign, sitting at a lunch counter, sticking a flower in a gun, setting up a tent, and occupying a space in the face state and corporate power is an act of utopian belief and faith. A belief, to go back to Berry's insight above, that something may not be--and should not be accepted as being--an economic, and therefore social, inevitability.

Belfast is a lovely movie for remembering the power that places have in defining who we are and the beauty of belonging well, even to a broken place.

Van Rys hopes readers are shaped by his tales of domestic comedy to see that love for the long haul, difficult as it is, is not only possible but greatly to be desired; to see that through our weakness and brokenness a certain glory shines.

Dunstan Thompson's poetic prayer reminds me how necessary Advent is and leaves me grateful for Christ’s work that makes his former foes members of his household.

This is poetry that focuses its readers on the true, good, and beautiful. Here, we are reminded that Christ took on flesh like ours, that he was born as we are, that he died as we will.

Perhaps activism needs such determined gentleness, illustrated in the pro-life students’ hours of prayer and the work of adoption agencies like my grandmother’s. Activism must be framed by an understanding of common grace, shared depravity, and our implications with each other: our membership, which is “the way we are.”