ISIS and the Enigma of Modernity

In the recently printed Spring 2015 edition of Salvo magazine, I have a feature in the Society section, in which I talk about the relationship of ISIS terrorism to the modern world. Drawing…

Light from the Christian West: Aquinas and Eastern Orthodoxy

Marcus Plested has done some important work to try to correct the tendency among Eastern Orthodox Christians to look upon Thomas Aquinas as the arch-villein of Western theology. In fact, he has…

The Task of Christian Parents is to Teach the Loveliness of the Faith

In my 2011 series ‘The Canterbury Letters‘ (of which I have only recently revealed myself to be the author), I made some observations about Christian parenting that may be helpful as a…

The Internet and Disembodiment

From my article ‘Marriage Between Humans and Robots (Part 4): customized intimacy and social narcisism‘ In 1997, Douglas Groothuis warned that the internet’s ability to deny both the user’s body (by focusing…

Calvin vs. Leithart

As I’ve gradually been moving posts from my old blog over to this new platform, I revisited my reply to Leithart’s article on the end of Protestantism (which is now available on…

Ecologists of the Technoscape

In Robert MacFarlane’s article ‘Landspeak‘, he describes some of the changes being made in the Oxford Junior Dictionary. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under…

The Fittingness of Biblical Ethics

From my Colson Center article ‘The Abstraction of God and the Culture Wars‘: In talking about sexual morality, it is typical to find pastors, Christian spokespersons and lay people alike, operating as…

Robots and Social Narcissism

From my article ‘The New Couplings: Are Human & Robot Weddings Next?‘: “Sociable robots promise to avoid the messiness of flesh-and-blood relationships through a kind of ‘customized intimacy.’ Imagine having a relationship…

Neuroplasticity and East-West Brain Differences

I have written before about how the way we use our brain actually alters its neurocircuitry. But the same principle also applies to culture. We now know that cultural assumptions, norms and…

We Have a Reading Problem

From my Colson Center article ‘Hollowing Out the Habits of Attention (Part 2)‘: …the main reading problem we face as a society is not simply that people aren’t reading enough; rather, the…

Wisdom from Saint Porphyrios

In my earlier post on parenting teens, I quoted Saint Porphyrios in words that are worth sharing on their own: What saves and makes for good children is the life of the…



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