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All Shall Be Well, But Not Cheaply

Every now and then, history does us the kindness of putting our complaints in perspective. That is not to say our complaints are unreal. A ruined morning can still be a ruined morning. The car will not start. The email you meant to send was not sent. The meeting went badly. The rain began just as you stepped outside. One should not despise the small aggravations of ordinary life. They are part of being human. Still, history has a way of clearing its throat. David Carpenter, the great historian of medieval England, reminds us that to live now—at least for many of us—is to live with protections our ancestors could scarcely imagine. We take for granted a political order in which conflict, however bitter, is ordinarily contained by law, election, debate, and institution. Thirteenth-century England knew no such settled blessing. Civil war meant burned property, slaughtered enemies, massacred Jews, hungry peasants, and towns pulled into the machinery of violence. And then there was hunge...
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Borrowing the Table

​ Borrowing the Table Christian imagery has a curious afterlife in secular culture. Even in settings far removed from ecclesial life, the symbols remain available—recognizable enough to carry emotional weight, detached enough to be repurposed at will. Megan Garber’s recent reflection on The Devil Wears Prada 2 in The Atlantic notices one such appropriation: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper appearing as the backdrop for a climactic dinner scene among the self-appointed elites of fashion, media, and wealth. Garber’s central question is sharp: What happens when a culture that no longer inhabits Christian belief still reaches for Christian symbols to dramatize its anxieties? The answer may be more revealing than the filmmakers intended. The Last Supper is not merely a familiar image. It depicts a particular kind of gathering: a meal overshadowed by betrayal, suffused with sacrifice, and transformed by Jesus’ strange self-giving. “This is my body, given for you” is not simply aes...
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The Pope on Bauldrillard

The Pope’s recent warning about the simulation of reality becomes more complicated the moment one asks what, exactly, is meant by “reality.” If reality is imagined as some pristine, unmediated presence standing transparently behind language, images, and symbols, then one is right to hesitate. Derrida has taught us to be suspicious of that kind of nostalgia. There never was a simple world of pure presence, untouched by mediation, waiting to be handed over intact. Human beings have always lived through words, signs, stories, rituals, and acts of interpretation. Indeed, the life of faith itself is irreducibly mediated. We know God not by escaping mediation, but through Scripture, sacrament, proclamation, memory, and flesh. The problem, then, is not mediation as such. That is where Lacan may be helpful.  For Lacan, “the real” is not just the ordinary world of objects lying about in front of us. It is, rather, what resists symbolization, what cannot be fully mastered by our systems of ...
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When the State Discovers There Is No Money in Ministry

There is something almost comic in the discovery that ministry does not pay well. Not comic in the sense of trivial. The finances of ministry are often painful. Pastors serve small congregations that can barely afford them. Seminarians graduate with debt into jobs that cannot reasonably repay it. Churches lament clergy shortages while offering compensation packages that require either heroic sacrifice, a working spouse, inherited wealth, or a second job. The comedy is darker than laughter. It is the comedy of belated recognition: a society built around earnings suddenly looks at ministry and announces, with bureaucratic seriousness, that the numbers do not work. The surprise is not that there is no money in ministry. The surprise is that anyone is surprised. A recent  Christianity Today  article by Emily Belz reports on a proposed federal regulation that would judge college and graduate programs by whether their graduates out-earn peers without the same degree. If programs fai...
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Orthodoxy and Its Discontents

There is a revealing irony at the heart of the recent Texas Monthly article on the quiet collapse of the Southern Baptist Convention. The movement that rose to power defending “biblical authority” now finds itself haunted by a different question altogether: Who gets to tell the truth? The article centers on Paul Pressler, the Texas judge and Baptist strategist who helped engineer the Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” beginning in 1979. Pressler and his allies believed the denomination had drifted into theological liberalism, especially in its seminaries. Through a remarkably disciplined campaign of elections, trustee appointments, and institutional realignment, conservatives seized control of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. The stated goal was doctrinal fidelity. The practical achievement was institutional power. Reading the article through Michel Foucault’s work on power and knowledge, one begins to see that the controversy was never merely about theology in ...
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​Bodies Remember What Minds Alone Cannot

David DeSteno’s recent New York Times essay raises a striking question: Can artificial intelligence become moral by being trained on religion? Anthropic, he notes, has sought counsel from clergy as it tries to make Claude “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” DeSteno’s answer is skeptical. Not because religion lacks moral wisdom, but because Claude lacks a body. That claim deserves attention. It also deserves extension. DeSteno’s argument is, at one level, straightforward. Religious life does not shape people chiefly by supplying doctrines or ethical propositions. It shapes them through bodily practices: prayer, fasting, meditation, singing, kneeling, gathering, blessing, grieving, feasting. It is one thing to possess a rule. It is another to be formed by a way of life. A machine may process texts about compassion, but it does not breathe through prayer, hunger through fasting, or find itself consoled by the touch and cadence of communal worship. What DeSteno sees through th...
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After Discourse: Democracy Between Anarchy and Tyranny

In March, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas died at the age of ninety-six. His passing invites a familiar kind of reflection: not only on a life, but on a hope. Habermas spent his career arguing that democracy depends on discourse—on citizens who give reasons, listen to one another, and submit their claims to public testing. Political power, he insisted, derives from the communicative power of the people. That hope now feels fragile. Recent events have made visible a deep fracture in democratic life. On one side lies fragmentation: a public sphere splintered into self-reinforcing enclaves, where truth dissolves into performance and attention becomes the only currency that matters. On the other side lies consolidation: decisions made without persuasion, without deliberation, without even the pretense of public justification. We are told that rational discourse has ended. But that diagnosis may be too simple. What we are witnessing is not the end of discourse so much as its distortion i...
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