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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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Prayers of the People Easter 5 Year A

​ For Easter 5, Year A , the readings naturally lend themselves to a form shaped around trust, living stones, mercy, and Christ as the way . Since the Prayer Book allows original forms so long as the required subjects are included, a responsive prayer  might work: strong congregational participation, clear theological movement, and language drawn from the appointed lessons. Sgsin, the Prayer Book requirement is coverage of the appointed subjects rather than use of one mandatory printed form.   Prayers of the People Easter 5, Year A Let us pray for the Church and for the world, saying, Risen Christ, hear our prayer. For the Church of God, built upon Christ the living stone: that we may be joined together as a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, and a people called to proclaim the mighty acts of God. Risen Christ, hear our prayer. For all bishops, priests, deacons, and lay ministers; for Michael, our Presiding Bishop; Dorothy, our Bishop; and for all who serve in this par...
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When the Story Changes the Room

On Broadway, brain chemistry, and the communal work of being re-storied At the Booth Theatre this spring, Kara Young describes something that sounds, at first, like a metaphor. Theater, she says, can “change your brain chemistry.” It is a bold claim—one that might be dismissed as actorly enthusiasm—until one listens more closely to what she is actually naming. In the current revival of Proof, the script has not changed. The lines remain the same. But the casting has. Black actors now inhabit roles that, in earlier productions, were not imagined in that way. And suddenly the story is not quite the same story. What once read primarily as a meditation on genius and mental illness becomes, in Young’s telling, a story also about Black genius, about caretaking under pressure, about the social textures of grief, about what is lost when a life is given over to holding another life together. Nothing in the text has altered. And yet everything has. This is precisely the sort of moment narrat...
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When Everything Is Free

Noah Hawley’s recent essay in The Atlantic , “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” is not finally about luxury. Private jets, elite guests, curated conversation, and expensive weather are part of the tableau, but they are not the burden of the piece. Hawley is after something deeper and more unsettling: what happens to the human soul when consequence begins to disappear. His most memorable line is also his thesis: for the richest men on earth, “everything is free and nothing matters.” That sentence deserves to be heard not only as cultural criticism but as theological diagnosis. The biblical tradition has older language for the condition Hawley describes. It calls it having “no fear of God.” That phrase is easily misunderstood. In modern ears, “fear of God” can sound like terror, coercion, or religious manipulation. But in Scripture the fear of the Lord is usually something more like reverence, humility, and answerability. It is the knowledge that one ...
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