We are Bound by Suffering and Love
Many religions understand suffering to be laden with the potential for spiritual awakening through a reduction of worldly attachments. But Christianity has a unique understanding of suffering that offers a particular kind of solace.
Beauty and Imagination in Christian Witness
When we see that beauty and imagination, rightly understood, are intellectual as well as affective, we no longer have to try to bridge some gap between imagination and reality.
Finding Rest in the Immanent Frame: a Review of Tish Harrison...
This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life.
Celebrity, Success, and the Kingdom of Heaven
Atlanta, GA. It’s been a rough few years for celebrity evangelicals. In the summer of 2019, Joshua Harris—the Calvinist pastor who became a national...
A Pastoral Inheritance: James Rebanks and a Tribute to Our Late...
There is much wisdom contained in English Pastoral for suffering churches. If the last fifty years have shown that innovation and modernization aren’t the solution to our ill-health, they have also made a nostalgic return to yesteryear an impossibility.
Localism and the Church
As a student of Christian history and an off-and-on conservative, I continue to be confused by the combination of Roman Catholic identity and Front...
Grail and Anti-Grail Quests
"After all, if you are too small to do anything, what need is there to stir!”
Taborian Cultural Competence
How do you measure the beauty, fittingness, and purposefulness of Hewitt, his family, farm, and community? I hope no one tries to innovate an inventory to do it.
Paul Kingsnorth and the Truer Path of Worship
A short review cannot do justice to the range of reasons visitors to the Porch should read Kingsnorth’s three novels, so I’ll begin simply by saying: Read them. These are thought-provoking, challenging, and linguistically creative novels.
A Book to Guide the Church: The 1662 Book of Common...
The IE is essentially the 1662 BCP of old, but unlike the Cambridge edition it is not just that and nothing more—it is the 1662 judiciously tweaked and supplemented in a way calculated to attract both newcomers to the BCP and long-time Anglicans.