Reads almost to the end of March

Wooo boy, a lot of reading this week! Let's start off with three pairs of loosely linked articles:

Two Atlantic pieces, one on the Crisis Pregnancy Center free speech case in front of the Supreme Court, and on the #MeToo movement's ramification in the Maryland legislature:
Emma Green, The Atlantic, Should Pro-Life Clinics Have to Post Information About Abortion?
Michelle Cottle, The Atlantic, 'I've Personally Sacrificed My Entire Career for This'

Two on racism – the burden of explaining its reality, and the burden of acknowledging our complicity:
Jemar Tisby, The Atlantic, The Heavy Burden of Teaching My Son About American Racism
Andrew Peterson, The Rabbit Room, Waking Up to "Is He Worthy?": An Apology

Two on justice – a conservative take on community conceptions of justice, and a left-leaning take on the history of American incarceration and how it might be reformed:
Charles Fain Lehman, The University Bookman, What Punishment? Whose Community?
Roger Lancaster, Jacobin, How to End Mass Incarceration

What does the religious life look like going into the 21st century? These first two pieces examine how monks and nuns are looking to recruit new members; following from the second, the next two look at the history of black women in the Catholic Church:
Stephen Hiltner, NYT, The World Is Changing. This Trappist Abbey Isn’t. Can It Last?
Julie Zauzmer, WaPo, Urging middle schoolers to consider the convent: ‘Do I want to marry Joe Blow? Or do I want to marry Jesus Christ?’
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, Global Sisters Report, Black spiritual traditions have long history in Catholic Church
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, Global Sisters Report, First black sisters pioneered black spirituality in Catholic Church

Speaking of black women in the church, Ekemini Uwan wrote a great piece on her site (Sistamatic Theology) on the difficulty of overcoming cultural bias in our minds and our churches: Decolonized Discipleship

Several pieces on women's stories – the way we dismiss female-made or female-focused art; Wendell Berry's wife; professional food critic gets mansplained; elderly Japanese women seeking shelter from loneliness in jail; Leslie Jamison is awesome:
Lili Loofbourow, VQR Online, The Male Glance
Robert Jensen, ABC Religion & Ethics, The Woman Beside Wendell: At Home with Tanya Berry
Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken – Here's the Recipe

Shiho Fukada, Pulitzer Center, For Many of Japan's Elderly Women, Prison Is a Haven

Chris Kraus & Leslie Jamison, The Paris Review, Big-Tent Recovery: An Interview with Leslie Jamison

Heck of a week for tech writing, as the world discovered Facebook is actually kind of bad. Highlights: Paul Ford suggests a digital EPA, Tamsin Shaw shows Silicon Valley's shady military-informational complex connections (and how they lead to publicly subsidized profits), Ifeoma Ajunwa and Ethan Zuckerman both show the bigger scale than the current crisis, Jeffrey Bilbro applies virtue ethics and localism to our tech problems, and Ross Douthat reminds us that amidst all the Facebook hubbub, cable TV is the real evil:

Paul Ford, Bloomberg Businessweek, Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here's How to Fix It.
Christine Emba, WaPo, Twitter Is Sick. The Prognosis Is Grim.
Laura Sydell, NPR, Is It Even Possible to Protect Your Privacy on Facebook?
Ifeoma Ajunwa, WaPo, Facebook users aren't the reason Facebook is in trouble now
Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, This Is So Much Bigger Than Facebook
Tamsin Shaw, New York Review of Books, Beware the Big Five
John Biggs, TechCrunch, #deletefacebook
Abby Ohlheiser, WaPo, You want to quit Facebook, but will you really click the button? These folks tried.

Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Technology and the Virtues: Scale Matters

Ross Douthat, NYT, Trump Hacked the Media Right Before Our Eyes

Segueing into the non-digital world, Facebook is building a town, and this is probably bad too. Speaking of tech and our cities, Uber killed a person; we should probably build our cities for people before we bring cars to life:
David Streitfeld, NYT, Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything Is Just Zucky.
Christina Bonnington, Slate, Are Our Roads Ready for Self-driving Cars?
Lewis McCrary, The American Conservative, Drivers Declare War on Walkers

Two pieces on knowledge: the first makes an interesting (but too short) point that we no longer evaluate information itself, but the reputation of our sources; the second is about the uncertainty of faith in a way that is pretty frustrating but very in line with the Charles Taylor "secular-3" thesis:

Gloria Origgi, Aeon, Say goodbye to the information age: it's all about reputation now
Lucy Bryan, The Other Journal, The Weight and Wonder of Everything We Do Not Know

Marriage and relationships: Marriage today seems to symbolize the achievement of two lives rather than inaugurating a new shared life (Cherlin); this individualization should be corrected by a community that supports and holds accountable (Olmstead). Of course, Facebook will not help with this (Sexton). For those not yet in marriageable relationships, hopefully the techno-commodification of online dating doesn't turn you off from human relationships (Alvarez), but be wary of your own desires, too; they are shaped by a fallen culture and assuming they must be indulged can have terrible consequences (Srinivasan). Modern childrearing is also shaped by a fallen culture, which places pressures upon parents that may not be as healthy as the "best practices" they to which they aspire (Huska): 
Andrew Cherlin, The Atlantic, Marriage Has Become a Trophy
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, Marriage Takes a Village
James Sexton, TIME, Divorce Lawyer: Facebook Is a Cheating Machine
Ana Cecilia Alvarez, The New Inquiry, Matchmaking

Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books, Does anyone have the right to sex?
Liuan Huska, CT, Has Attachment Theory Made Us Anxious Parents?

Christian stuff: Rachael Denhollander is more theologically sound and persevering in faith than the majority of white American evangelical leaders (Morehead) – except Russell Moore; that guy's cool (Hemingway). Serious Catholics are just as politically homeless as the remaining faithful Protestants (Dolan). Christians are pretty falsely nostalgic and culture-war-y in their responses to ethically fraught current events (Scheiss); this is probably why the March For Life has more of a preaching-to-the-choir, positive-thinking vibe than the working-for-real-solutions March For Our Lives (Unger). Christianity does offer the tools to transcend Americanized individualism without slipping into anonymous collectivism (Ballor). The Church needs to reconsider structures of accountability and willingly accept limits and vulnerability if it wants to stop having to be disappointed when the frauds and hucksters it's put in power fall (Crouch):

Jason Morehead, Christ & Pop Culture, America’s Evangelical Leaders Could Learn a Lot From Rachael Denhollander

Mark Hemingway, The Weekly Standard, Like Sheep Among Wolves
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Wall Street Journal, The Democrats Abandon Catholics

Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Why Do Christians Respond so Poorly to Tragedies Like the Parkland School Shooting?

Andrew Unger, CT, Two Marches for Lives
Jordan J Ballor, The Public Discourse, Madeline L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Christianity: Moving Beyond Collectivism and Individualism
Andy Crouch, TGC, It's Time to Reckon with Celebrity Power

Reviews: As Frank Sobotka said in The Wire, "We used to build shit here [in Baltimore]" – one of the things we built was a massive sewer system, despite misinformed NIMBYism; hopefully, we can overcome it again (Puglionesi). Speaking of The Wire, how do you share art when said art takes dozens and dozens of hours to consume, and is probably dated pretty specifically (Bunch)? I couldn't watch The Simpsons growing up; I'd never have time to watch it all now, and I might not get a lot of the timely references anymore, but David Foster Wallace would argue I'm better off without that injection of bitter irony anyway (Reinke). It would be a better use of my time reading some poetry in nature (Olmstead) or seeing how beautiful paintings can find glory in everyday life (Benfy):

Alicia Puglionesi, Atlas Obscura, The Manmade Marvel of the Baltimore Sewers
Sonny Bunch, The Weekly Standard, Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?
Tony Reinke, Desiring God, Did the Simpsons Ruin a Generation?
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, A Life of the Land, Cut Short
Christopher Benfy, New York Review of Books, Renoir's Onions

Miscellaneous stuff!

Ana Stankovic, Los Angeles Review of Books, I Am Not a Marxist
Charlie Clark, Mere Orthodoxy, Let Us Now Praise Fractious Men: The Hillbilly as Economic Dissident
Elizabeth Weil, NYT Magazine, Alone At Sea: Why He Kayaked Across the Atlantic at 70 (For the Third Time)
Simona Foltyn, Columbia Journalism Review, After US journalist killed in South Sudan, a quest for answers

More March Reads

I've been making it a point to seek out more female writers after seeing the disparities between male and female authors in what I read the first several weeks of this year. This week, it really paid off, because there were so many great things to read by women. Here are a few pieces on subjects that could have been written about by men, but would likely have been approached differently:
Leslie Jamison, NYT Magazine, Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
Abby Perry, Fathom: The Steep, Words shape us
Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Subtweeting Our Righteousness before Men

Two related pieces on parenting and childcare:
Tara Ann Thieke, The Kitchen Table, Invisible Caregivers, Invisible Children
Katelyn Beatty, CT, Babies Need Their Moms. But Moms Need Paid Leave.

Liz is a socialist and a woman, so it's no surprise that she had to write a response to everyone who mansplained her after the first piece here:
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, It's time to give socialism a try
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Let's have a good faith argument about socialism

These two pieces aren't related other than being long, well-written explorations of complex and esoteric issues. The first looks at Christianity and Vodou in Haiti, and examines the Venn diagrams of Vodou and Pentecostalism, mega- and local churches, NGOs and Christian aid groups, and so much more; it's fantastic. The latter is about naturalistic philosophy and psychology, and looks at the history of a bizarre but widespread trend of materialist thinkers diving so far down the rabbit-hole of their arguments that they end up convinced that there can be no such thing as consciousness:
Susana Ferreira, The Believer, For G-d So Loved Haiti
Galen Strawson, New York Review of Books, The Consciousness Deniers

Food, memory, community, capitalism, food, marketing, nostalgia, food, stories, food:
Tara Isabella Burton, 1843 Magazine, What 24 hours in a diner taught me about New York
Alicia Puglionesi, Baltimore Pizza Club, While the pile of crust goes skyward
Taffy Broadesser-Akner, Saveur, Let's Go to Jerusalem for Soup Again

The connecting link between these pieces is their connection to reads from previous weeks, from porn and the #MeToo movement, to Steven Pinker's new book, to people of color leaving white-encultured churches, to the state of evangelicalism after Trump, to Kate Bowler's new book.

Meagan Tyler, ABC Religion & Ethics, Leaving Blokesworld: Why You Can't Have Your Porn and #MeToo – Cosign.

Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic, When Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough – this is a particularly interesting take on Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, arguing that "rational progress" has been uniquely detrimental to localism and community, making it harder for people to embrace embodied pluralism, and therefore has led to the resentments at the root of our politics nowadays.
Frances Crusoe, Fathom Mag, Multicultural but Still Homogenous – A frustrating personal narrative to go with the recent NYT "quiet exodus" piece. I found myself kind of arguing with the author, even though I would generally think of myself as sympathetic to black people leaving evangelical churches. This reveals to me how crucial it is to really listen to these stories, because even if I wouldn't want to go to an impersonal megachurch or have a pastoral style that constantly comments on current events, if people are being driven away from a church or the Church, it's time to evaluate where our priorities lie.
David French, National Review, The True Sin of American Evangelicals in the Age of Trump – Also frustrating, a response to Michael Gerson's Atlantic piece that is too concerned with hedging about the legitimacy of evangelical fears. I share a lot of these concerns too, but come on – Gerson has an established career and record as an evangelical conservative; he didn't really need to spend his piece relitigating Roe v. Wade or Obergefell. His down-playing of white Christian's racial fears and hatreds would be a much more appropriate angle for criticism, but it's not here. 
Marcia Bosscher, The Well, The Middle Is Not the End: An Interview with Kate Bowler

Also related to a previous piece was Vann R Newkirk III's brutal Atlantic satire of Farhad Manjoo's NYT piece on print vs. social media news: Unplugging From the Internet Nearly Destroyed Me. This was also a good reminder that some of our most breathless, hysterical takes often hyperventilate too much for their own good. Case in point was the worst thing I read this week, Stephen B Tippins Jr's Anti-Social Network in The American Conservative. While I did get a little more charitable towards this piece once I realized it was from back in 2011, it's still so bad, and shows how a lot of fears about the crisis of the moment have a lot more to do with us and our cultural biases than the reality of the situation, which might not be nearly as dystopian as it seems.

But then a story like this breaks:
Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison, The Guardian, Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Alexis C Madrigal, The Atlantic, What Took Facebook So Long?

And I am reminded why I click on everything like this that I see:

Karol Markowicz, NY Post, Maybe it's time for everyone to give up on social media

And why I remain pretty critical of technology all the same:
L M Sacasas, The Frailest Thing, Why We Can't Have Humane Technology

This is the confessional portion of this week's roundup, in which I admit that I read not one, but two articles about the President and his alleged affair with a porn star. I also read some other bad news about him, and generally regret it about as much as I usually do. Mea Culpa.
Lili Loofbourow, The Week, Stormy Daniels is crushing President Trump at his own game
Matthew Walther, The Week, Stormy Daniels bringing down Trump would be the poetic justice America needs
Ruth Marcus, WaPo, Trump had senior staff sign nondisclosure agreements. They’re supposed to last beyond his presidency.

Quinta Jurecic & Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic, Is America on the Verge of a Constitutional Crisis?

It's pieces like the above that make me long for a more robust and theologically rich politics, like these pieces describe:

Rachel Anderson, Public Justice Review, Citizenship as Craft

Bradford Littlejohn, The Davenant Trust, Protestantism After Liberalism? An Untapped Resource for Christian Political Thought

Two churchy pieces (a review of Alan Jacob's book on the BCP that was actually too dense for me, and an article on inner city churches that reminds us we have to be a body that is true to the parts that it has):
Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, Comment, Living Words for a Living Faith
Tyler St Clair, TGC, Why We Restarted Our Church

Lastly, UMBC's president gets a free ad printed on a major magazine's website because the boys from his school through a ball through a hoop more times than boys from a different school (but it is a good read):
Freeman Hrabowski, The Atlantic, The Secret Behind the Greatest Upset in College Basketball History

Thoughts on Augustine's City of God - Book I

This is my first reading of Augustine's City of God, and to try to get a little more of it, I'm going to try blogging a summary and any thoughts I might have for each book. Book I starts off curiously, with Augustine sarcastically pointing out the failure of the Roman gods to save Rome from the recent "catastrophe" of invasion while contrasting the fact that even non-Christian Romans were spared in the Christian basilicas. Why start here?

Augustine is obliquely setting up the central tension of his argument through a classic philosophical question: why do bad things happen to good people (and vice versa)? Why did God shelter Romans who falsely claimed in His name while allowing some Christians to be tortured, raped, or killed? What greater purpose was served by the sack of Rome? Believing in the providence of God, he sees a variety of reasons God may afflict the righteous or show mercy to unbelievers, some more convincing than others, but final explanations are not really the heart of the matter here. The primary question (set up in I.8) is "What use is made of the things thought to be blessings, and of the things reputed evil?" What is the telos of blessings and disasters? This question is worth asking whether we are seeking the end intended by God in His ineffable plan, or merely the best way to interpret and learn from our perception of a situation. 

These ultimate ends are crucial to search out, as they orient us on our paths through life. Augustine turns to an examination of Christian concerns: Is burial essential? If not, is it worthwhile? Is one's chastity violated by rape? Is suicide ever justified in the face of others' sin (or one's own)? Here, he is constantly pointing his readers to find their ultimate end in God and the eternal Christian hope. God is concerned with the things of this world, our lives, our struggles, our bodies. Burial, for instance, is a practice worthy of considered thought, because "[a] man's body is no mere adornment, or external convenience; it belongs to his very nature as a man. (I.13)" However, this mortal life is not our chief end; in every beloved detail, it points to something more. God "is concerned with the bodies of the dead, so as to promote faith in the resurrection." Through temporal trials, we should come to be aware of our immoderate love of the things of this world, be convicted of our sin or humbled by our dependence on Heaven, and reorder our hearts towards a greater hope: "what is to be loved is the incorruptible good. (I.10)"

But these trials have not had this effect on the Roman pagans; their reaction to the sack of Rome is to blame the Christians. Even those who were saved by claiming sanctuary in the name of Christ fail to see His saving power at work. In I.30, Augustine exposes the true motivation here: Rome is a decadent society of hedonists, longing to exploit their material prosperity in cheap pleasures without the scolding eye of the Christians looking on. The pagans use the goods of this world for the ends of this world, temporal and fleeting. Their vices were not corrected or mitigated by their recent trials (I.33), and their short-sighted vision allows the pagan spirits to tempt them into deeper and deeper vice (I.32). 

And yet, God allowed many Romans to live, some sheltered dishonestly within his own temples. Why? Augustine writes that the Church must extend sanctuary protection even to those hostile to her, for "[she] must bear in mind that among these very enemies are hidden her future citizens (I.35)." Moreover, many claiming Christian allegiance, themselves participants in the sacraments, are not true members of the Church. "In truth, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgement. (I.35)" 

How are we to discern between the two cities? If their intermingled tension is such that we cannot, how should we best orient our paths toward the Heavenly one? What role do the gods of this world play in distracting us from right paths, and how can we trust that the one true and living God is working in the midst of calamity? 

March Reads week two-ish

Martyn Wendell Jones leads off this week's reads with his magisterial profile of the Bakker family and the surrounding culture of religious enthusiasm in The Weekly Standard: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: A Scandal of the Self

Some articles on modern political problems. Cedric Johnson's essay fits with the second piece due to its discussion of modern policing, and with the third due to its discussion of pre-political identity, but honestly I mostly grouped these together because I thought it was funny to match a journal produced by Jacobin with two conservative magazines:
Cedric Johnson, Catalyst Journal, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now
Adam Rubenstein, The Weekly Standard, Radley Balko: 'The Biggest Problem in Our System is Bad Incentives'

Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, Confiscating the Nation

The tech section. AJ's essay, of course, is everything I've ever wanted; everything else is mostly, as usual, terrible. 

Alan Jacobs, Hedgehog Review, Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future
Anastasia Basil, Medium, Porn Is Not the Worst Thing on Musical.ly
Joseph Bottum, Washington Free Beacon, At the Algorithm's Mercy

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News
Farhad Manjoo, NYT, For Two Months I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned.

Speaking of the Internet, it's generally a good reminder to reexamine our levels of charity to others when thinking about it:

Katherine Mangu-Ward, NYT, When Smug Liberals Met Conservative Trolls

Jake Meador, Mere O, The Grace of Good Questions

These articles on the changing makeup of the Church are crucial. There have been numerous examinations of craven white evangelicals' capitulation during the 2016 election, and the resultant brutality inflicted on the souls of minority Christians; these are not the full extent of the analysis needed of this moment in history, but they certainly help. Jesus, come quickly, or send us some non-Western missionaries enflamed with the Spirit. 
Campbell Robertson, NYT, A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Worshippers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches
Deborah Jian Lee, Religion Dispatches, Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads
Michael Gerson, The Atlantic, The Last Temptation
Emma Green, The Atlantic, How Trump is Remaking Evangelicalism
Jake Meador, Mere O, The Evangelical Center After Billy Graham
Saba Imtiaz, The Atlantic, A New Generation Redefines What It Means to Be a Missionary

At least there are Christians reporting on science for Christianity Today, even if the profile of Christian conservationists staring down mass extinction is really depressing in its own way:

Cara Daneel, CT, Creation Groans, but God Hears: Many Species Face "Thinning of Life"
Stephanie Zhang, CT, Behaving Like Children or Chimps?

Some theology and philosophy. 
Fleming Rutledge, Generous Orthodoxy: Ruminations, The concept of sacrifice: The latest thing on the hit list?

John Woodbridge, CT, Why Christian Theology Needs (Former) Atheists
Gilbert Meilander, First Things, Virtuous Evildoers

Brian Wright, Desiring God, Read the Bible with Someone Else

On #MeToo and how not to let ourselves off the hook for our own sins; how Christians must speak up, but with humility; on raising boys in a culture of toxic masculinity (the first two-thirds would be a good first quarter of a better essay, which would not include the final third at all).

Ethan McCarthy, Christ & Pop Culture, Louis's Sins and Mine

Phil Mobley, By Faith, Christianity and Complicity
Michael Kimmel, The Cut, Raise Your Son to Be a Good Man, Not a 'Real' Man

Also somewhat #MeToo-related, a brief look at Rachael Denhollander's shot across the bow of SGM:
Ruth Graham, Slate, Larry Nassar’s First Accuser Is Taking On Another Big Target—This Time, Within Her Own Evangelical Community

Reviews: more Lady Bird, an interview with the founder of The Toast, and a look at Christian Wiman's new collection of poems on Joy. 

Clare Coffey, National Catholic Reporter, 'Lady Bird' inspires memories of Catholic high school and the sisters
Constance Grady, Vox, Mallory Ortberg talks The Toast, The Merry Spinster, and the joys of peanut butter
James Matthew Wilson, Law & Liberty, Joy's Mysteries

Two last reviews on Black Panther:

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, The Tragedy of Erik Killmonger
Kathryn Freeman, Christ & Pop Culture, The Role of Black Women in the Church: A Wakandan View of Flourishing

The last of the Febreads, and Marching on

So many good book reviews this week. First, here's Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler, arguing that superficial positive reviews are infantilizing for women and people of color, marginalizing them from the intellectual conversation under the guise of supporting them: In Praise of Negative Reviews

Here are some negative book reviews of the Steven Pinker scientism joint.
Nick Spencer, Theos, Enlightenment and Progress, or why Steven Pinker is wrong
Peter Harrison, ABC Religion & Ethics, The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker
Ross Douthat, NYT, The Edges of Reason

The best book review (and probably, overall piece) I read this week was Brad East's engagement with Patrick Deneen's How Liberalism Failed and Jamie Smith's Awaiting the King in LA Review of Books. It's a great overview of the debate over political theology and how Christianity should relate to the system of liberalism: Holy Ambivalence

That led me to this overview of Deneen's book, as well as the author's blog:
Patrick J Deneen, ABC Religion & Ethics, The Triumphant Failure of Liberalism
Brad East, Resident Theologian, Principles of Luddite pedagogy

And many other solid reviews here as well (OK, the last one is a movie).
Park MacDougald, American Affairs, Fascists and Revolutionaries

Justin Lee, First Things, Bros Against Humanity
Catherine Cusick, Longreads, An Education in Doubt
Kelly Jane Torrance, National Review, The Struggle for Meaning
Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman, “Senior year burns brightly. There is a vividness in worlds coming to an end”: Lady Bird’s aesthetic of memory

A varied assortment of national politics griping, from (legitimately) fake news, to the President's circle of corruption, to the unmitigated malice even in the face of death on social media, to America's depressing child mortality rates, to the true purpose of guns:
Kevin D Williamson, National Review, An Epidemic of Dishonesty on the Right
David A Graham, The Atlantic, Trump's Real Scandal is Hiding in Plain Sight

Samuel James, MereO (Inklingations), The Wrong Spite of History

Matthew Loftus, America, The United States is dangerous for children. How we can help more of them live to see adulthood?

Christine Emba, WaPo, We All Know What Guns Are Really For

Also on the political front is this great profile of Eric Metaxas and his craven capitulation to Trump, as candidate and now as President. Illuminating but challenging to read is the full email exchange between the author and subject, in which he (Metaxas) begins graciously, but gradually grows more and more towards the very likeness of Godwin's Law (not to mention Poe's). A response to some of his comments by fellow Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh is also intriguing.

Jon Ward, Yahoo News, Author Eric Metaxas, evangelical intellectual, chose Trump, and he's sticking with him
Jon Ward, Medium, My Email Exchange with Eric Metaxas
Charles Marsh, Medium, Charles Marsh responds to Eric Metaxas

Leslie Jamison is simply a phenomenal writer. I wish she'd engaged more with Martha Nussbaum's ideas on retribution at the end of the anger piece, but these are both worth reading.
Leslie Jamison, VQR Online, The Breakup Museum
Leslie Jamison, NYT Mag, I Used to Insist I Didn't Get Angry. Not Anymore.

In the vein of Leslie Jamison, here are several pieces chronicling female pain, from the surrealistic trauma of recovery from an aneurysm, to the difficulty of caring for children when they and you are far from home, to overcoming the shame associated with painful sex, and finally, political ostracism for speaking the truth: 
Emily Carter Roiphe, Longreads, The Hotel of Multiple Realities
Rachel Pieh Jones, The Other Journal, Split Me Open
Joy Pedrow Skarka, Fathom, Having Painful Sex

Mona Charen, NYT, I'm Glad I Got Booed at CPAC

Some of these pains may affect women more directly or frequently, but can be shared by men as well. Matthew Loftus shares the fear of needing medical care for a child when you live where it's not as available; this great profile of Brendan Fraser adds a new voice to the #MeToo movement:

Matthew Loftus, Making the little things available for little people

Zach Baron, GQ, Whatever Happened to Brendan Fraser?

I didn't really like this piece; it basically argues that social movements should appropriate little "tools" from religious practices to strengthen themselves, and it does so in a way that makes it seem that she thinks they function just as effectively stripped of their source and context. I'm open to that argument from some angles, but this one didn't work.
Danielle Celermajer, ABC Religion & Ethics, Shelter in a Hurricane: Muscular Silence and Creative Resistance

Urban issues:
Ariel Aberg-Riger, CityLab, When America's Basic Housing Unit Was a Bed, Not a House
Kate Wagner, The Atlantic, City Noise Might Be Making You Sick

Priya Fielding-Singh, Los Angeles Times, Why do poor Americans eat so unhealthfully? Because junk food is the only indulgence they can afford

Daryl Crouch, CT Pastors, How to Serve Your City When You Aren't a Megachurch

A poem:

Lauren K Alleyne, The Atlantic, Martin Luther King Jr Mourns Trayvon Martin

Gracy Olmstead writing Gracy Olmstead things: The American Conservative, Sourdough Bread and the Cult of Convenience

Science!
Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, Life Can Survive in the Most Mars-Like Place on Earth

Media in the digital age:
Maria Bustillos (with Karen K Ho), Columbia Journalism Review, Erasing History
Quinn Norton, The Atlantic, The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger

Capitalism in a virtue-commodifying age:
Ross Douthat, NYT, The Rise of Woke Capital

On slave narratives and theology:
David Roach, CT, Reprint of Ex-slave's Theology Book Opens 'Underexplored Vista'
Joy Craun, CT, We Need to Read Stories of People Who Were Enslaved

And lastly:
Matthew Miller, MereO, Singing as Part of Family Worship