Culture

There is something aleatoric about the content of these columns. Frankly, it depends on what has been buzzing around my head in the last seven days. And what is it this week? Well, a conversation with a Jewish lady who sat next to me on a flight from Toronto to Atlanta! I'd been upgraded--bliss!...

It is arguable that the last hundred years have witnessed an interesting reversal in Western society, where the great taboo of the Victorian era and the great obsession of the same period have dramatically switched places. The great taboo for Victorians was, of course, sex. Human beings all depend...

A friend of mine, some five years ago now, introduced me to Vigen Guroian when he suggested I read Inheriting Paradise (Eerdmans, 1999), a short but immensely satisfying meditation on the relationship of theology to gardening. Earlier this year, I was pleased to find that Guroian had continued his...

Teaching history is probably one of the more depressing activities in which one can engage in the current climate. At an academic level, the discipline has been in self-destruct mode for some time, losing itself in a morass of hyperspecialised narratives, nihilistic epistemologies and general...

In an article in the Chicago Tribune this week, Jodi Cohen and Maegan Carberry discussed the case of Kate Darmody, a winning member of the National Championship Women's Lacrosse team from Northwestern University. She, along with her fellow players had been invited to the White House to meet the...

Recently, I had occasion to fly to Korea via San Francisco. Flying across the US on a clear day is one of those rare pleasures which really allows you to get the geographical measure of the place: how flat much of the country is; how the snow-capped Rockies push the land upwards towards the sky in...

The Braves are playing poorly. Not that I'd notice too much. You see, it's my wife's love--baseball that is, not mine. And she has lost something of her joie de vivre . I try to console, but when those guys swing and miss all the time, it makes for an unhappy time. Baseball is her way of relaxation...

Nearly a decade ago now, Lisa and I went to visit an art exhibit at a private gallery on Manhattan. I had recently become acquainted with the Japanese-American artist Makoto Fujimura, and I wanted to see his work for myself. The exhibition was called "Images of Grace," and we were dazzled to...

I have quite a collection of books on the arts from a Christian perspective, but I was so eager for Dr. Ryken's new book, that I have had it on backorder since last December. The subtitle of the book is A Call to Recover the Arts. In some ways it is frustrating that a book like this is necessary...

I do not have the space in this brief review to give a summary of the content of the whole of this remarkable book; rather I will mention just a couple of highlights. Last year I had the students in my Apologetics and Understanding Contemporary Culture class read Total Truth . Almost without...