What I read in the office in August

First, some local news – Baltimore is infested with hipsters (Mohammed); our arrabers visit Mennonite farms for their produce (McFadden); suburb-dwellers are racist, lying fools (Graves); sometimes small good things happen (Lanahan):
Sagal Mohammed, Evening Standard, Why Baltimore is the coolest city on the East Coast
David McFadden, Baltimore Sun, How Mennonite farmers are helping to keep Baltimore's arabber tradition alive

Lucia Graves, The Guardian, ‘Addicts, crooks, thieves’: the campaign to kill Baltimore's light rail

Lawrence Lanahan, Baltimore Fishbowl, State awards $23 million in financing to develop low-income housing in Baltimore’s suburbs and downtown

Some stuff for conservatives (kind of) – disenchantment is the water we swim in (Sikkema); when we try to make politics secular, it institutionalizes the dismissal of religious belief (Meadowcroft); many young people are more apathetic than vehement in their disbelief (Brian/Sixsmith); conservatives find life more meaningful than liberals, although none of those words have any fixed meaning at this point (Khazan); a definition of conservatism that actually remembers it's supposed to conserve something (Stangler):
Doug Sikkema, The New Atlantis, Disenchantment, Actually
Micah Meadowcroft, Washington Free Beacon, Sacred Politics
Paul Rowan Brian & Ben Sixsmith, The Public Discourse, Apatheism Is More Damaging to Christianity Than Atheism and Antitheism
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, Why Conservatives Find Life More Meaningful Than Liberals

R M Stangler, The American Conservative, Aldo Leopold's Ecological Conservatism

Hopefully, the Left learns something about morality soon; currently, they seem to be on the same trend of factual relativism (Gray) and moral libertinism (Williamson). There is some movement to return to a place of moral clarity, but it's not particularly convincing, tending towards "quantum oneness" (Smarsh) or outright witchcraft woowoo (Yar). A more critical view of our modern world and institutions must account for the things lost by whatever gains have been made (Gurstein), but real moral clarity isn't going to be likely until one realizes they are going to die (Arieff).
John Gray, UnHerd, The rise of post-truth liberalism

Kevin D Williamson, National Review, The Psalmist and the Sex Doll 
Sarah Smarsh, The Guardian, How the American Left is rediscovering morality

Sanam Yar, NYT, Witchcraft in the #MeToo Era
Rochelle Gurstein, The Baffler, Self-Invasions and the Invaded Self

Allison Arieff, NYT, Life Is Short. That's the Point.

Technology! IT IS TERRIBLE. I mean, some/most of it, at least. Tufecki gives a brilliant history of the effects of social media on social movements from the Arab Spring through the 2016 elections, and how the once-hopeful benefits of democratizing technology were monetized, then co-opted by authoritarians in the absence of stronger guardrails. Jackson provides a similar history of lies and vitriol among the actual users of the Internet. Emba reads Neil Postman and questions whether the Web is as morally neutral as we think. Glaser criticizes the one-dimensional morality of Twitter's new policy towards trolls. Jacobs reads an oral history of Silicon Valley and longs for a shower of disinfectant afterwards. Wiener looks at her own data and finds a bizarre but beautiful nostalgia. Peterson is no longer willing to commoditize his family to build his online brand: 

Zeynep Tufecki, MIT Technology Review, How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
Gita Jackson, Kotaku, We Can't Fix the Internet
Christine Emba, WaPo, Is the Internet evil?
April Glaser, Slate, Fighting “Dehumanization” Is Not Good Enough to Fix Twitter
Alan Jacobs, Weekly Standard, Land of Forever Tomorrow
Anna Wiener, The Atlantic, What It's Like to Wallow in Your Own Facebook Data
Andrew Peterson, Rabbit Room, Wrestling the Giant: Why I Deleted Instagram

Institutional decline was on my mind a lot this month – perhaps the Internet's physical infrastructure will just wash away in rising sea levels (Borunda); we need Wendell Berry's 50-year Farm Bill more than ever (Atkin); public school history leaves a lot to be desired – specifically, truth (Wong); the bridge and pier collapses will continue until morale improves (Bogost); writers on the Right and Left agree that democratic norms are in trouble (Shenk); our economy doesn't know how to recognize non-material goods (Gates); cars suck and should be banned (Atkin again); local politics are turning into the same sewer as national politics (Luttrull); in short, everything is terrible, even though we should still work to make it better (Olmstead):
Alejandra Borunda, National Geographic, The Internet Is Drowning
Emily Atkin, New Republic, Trump’s Farmer Bailout and America’s Broken Food System
Alia Wong, The Atlantic, How History Classes Helped Create a 'Post-Truth' America
Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, More Bridges Will Collapse
Timothy Shenk, New Republic, Is Democracy Really Dying?
Bill Gates, Gates Notes, Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend
Emily Atkin, New Republic, The Modern Automobile Must Die
Daniel Luttrull, Front Porch Republic, The Facebookification of Local Politics: Extending the Wall of the Bathroom Stall
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, Our Civic Institutions Are Self-Destructing

Two more fantastic pieces by the same author about two pretty charged issues (gun control and climate change) that are just gorgeously written, showing the human side of both subjects and refusing to dismiss the people on either side as monsters or deserving of judgement for a difference of opinion:

Elaina Plott, The Atlantic, The Bullet in My Arm

Elaina Plott, Pacific Standard, The Country's First Climate Change Casualties?

Another declining institution: fertility. Kilpatrick argues that a liberal viewpoint that despises children will never make a safety net that cares for the vulnerable. Gorvett reveals the masculinizing effects of hormonal birth control on women; Halpern examines the feminizing effects of BPA, phthalates, and other endocrine disrupting chemicals on men (more articles like these two will necessitate the initiation of a new section, "Chemistry: Everything is Terrible":

Connor Kilpatrick, Jacobin, It's Okay to Have Children
Zaria Gorvett, BBC, The Strange Truth About the Pill
Daniel Noah Halpern, GQ, Sperm Count Zero

And, of course, unfortunately, there's the President. Tomasky analyzes the Russia investigation and asks what Trump knew and when he knew it. Rucker & Costa look at the new Woodward book and some of its wilder stories of the frustration of the White House staff with their foolish boss; one of them wrote an unsigned op-ed for the Times to share their work in opposing him. This is no true courage, but an act of some Republicans being so unwilling to cling to power that they will cling to it unconstitutionally rather than take action to remove an unfit President (Frum & Judge).
Michael Tomasky, NY Review of Books, Hail to the Chief
Philip Rucker & Robert Costa, WaPo, Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency
Anonymous (TBD), NYT, I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration
David Frum, The Atlantic, This Is a Constitutional Crisis
Monique Judge, The Root, You Are Not Part of the 'Resistance' If You Are Hiding Behind Anonymity

However, he's the leader we deserve (Olmstead), pointlessly cruel and eminently thoughtless (Bruenig). The white evangelicals who elected him still cling to him (Wagner) – where does their faith truly lie (Horton)? They may say or even believe it is with the God of the Bible, but the words they use are empty symbols, no longer referring to anything concrete (Hawthorne). Meanwhile, their true leader's appropriation of religious language turns off those outside the Church, and makes even believers uncomfortable in bringing up their now-politicized religion.
Gracy Olmstead, The Week, Trump is the navel-gazing president for our navel-gazing society
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Cruelty without consequence is Trump's way
Alex Wagner, The Atlantic, The Church of Trump
Michael Horton, CT, What Are Evangelicals Afraid of Losing?
John W Hawthorne, Sociological Reflections, Evangelical Simulacra
Jonathan Merritt, The Daily Beast, Trump’s God-Talk Is Turning America Off Religion

He is not the only barrier to belief, however. Many Catholics have found the child abuse and clerical coverup within the Roman Church an insurmountable obstacle to their continued membership (Linker); the loss of them and uncountable future members as a result of this is tantamount to soul murder (Blanchfield). Questions remain about which accusations are true – another case of "who knew what, and when?" (Bruenig) In the meantime, we should mourn with the victims (Tushnet) and be thankful for those who have faithfully sounded the alarm on this for years (Ruse).
Damon Linker, The Week, The unbearable ugliness of the Catholic Church
Patrick Blanchfield, The Revealer, Soul Murder
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Catholics face a painful question: Is it true?

Eve Tushnet, Patheos, A Cloud of Witnesses

Austin Ruse, Crisis, Rod Was Right and I Was Wrong

Much of the Church – Protestant and Catholic alike – is in a state of disunity, whether as a result of sexual abuse or the pursuit of power. At the root, it's that desire for power all the way down, of course (Beaty), and we must think about how to organize our polity in such a way that ensures individual accountability without allowing the structure to grow so as to seek primarily its own preservation (Warren). In such a time, we must look to our suffering Savior, remembering that at His own hour of reckoning, His response was not a strong defense, but a willing acceptance (Harding). Rather than fight each other, we must long for one another's salvation, knowing that our own is bound up with it (Hill):

Katelyn Beaty, Religion News Service, As Willow Creek reels, churches must reckon with how power corrupts

Tish Harrison Warren, Mere O, Why Evangelicals Should Care More About Ecclesiology

Leander Harding, Covenant, Being Disarmed
Wesley Hill, First Things, No Salvation Without the Other

Thankfully, there are witnesses left to the holistic Biblical vision of personal and societal righteousness (Ellis). This may be the history of Christian political activism for AIDS victims (Igoe) or the conversion and repentance of an avowed racist (Franco/Radford). But there are still plenty of opportunities for Christians to work for repentance and reconciliation between races (Tuininga), better understanding and ordering of human desires (Anderson), or protecting the liberty and security of our Muslim neighbors (Belz):

Carl Ellis, TGC, Biblical Righteousness Is a Four-Paned Window
Michael Igoe, Devex, Christians and the new age of AIDS

Aaron Franco & Morgan Radford, NBC News, Ex-KKK member denounces hate groups one year after rallying in Charlottesville
Matthew Tuininga, The Witness, Have We Already Gotten Over Charlottesville?
Matthew Lee Anderson, Mere O, Assorted Thoughts after Revoice
Mindy Belz, World, A space for freedom

On that note, a whole bunch of Christian living/theology stuff – too much to list individually:

Michael Rhodes, CT, God's Battle for Your Bank Account
Brandon McGinley, Scottish Catholic Observer, Being Catholic means sharing in both the joy of life and the grief of death
Jasmine Holmes & Lisa Fields, CT, Rethinking Apologetics for the Black Church

Angela Franks, Plough, What's a Body For?

Collin Huber, The Village Church Resources, Decrease Your Vision

Mark Galli, CT, In the Beginning Is Silence
Jen Wilkin, CT, Heaven Shines, But Who Cares?

Ashley Hales, CT, What We Lose When Hymnbooks Disappear

Trillia Newbell, TableTalk Magazine, Store Up the Truth

Daniel Hyun, Facts & Trends, When People Leave

Two more related theological pieces, both on the silence of God (not surprisingly, Fleming Rutledge comes out on top in my opinion, but both are worth reading):

Fleming Rutledge, Christian Century, Divine absence and the light inaccessible
Rowan Williams, Christian Century, Silence in the face of mystery

Some more lovely thinking, from Christians with a more philosophical bent, thinking about how we know what we know – how we organize our knowledge (Marble), how we draw connections within it (McEntyre), and who we trust to provide knowledge (Schiess). Even conspiracy theories and cryptozoological craziness reflects a desire to understand things, to know and love the world we inhabit (Coffey). The world does much to discourage us from applying these lenses to ourselves with the same rigor (Jacobs).
Joshua Marble, Front Porch Republic, The Names of Things
Marilyn McEntyre, Comment, Held in Common
Kaitlyn Schiess, Christ & Pop Culture, The Bible, Explained

Clare Coffey, The New Atlantis, The Joy of Cryptozoology
Alan Jacobs, Comment, Outside In

Two sets of linked pieces: Maryanne Wolf with a piece on her new book about digital reading, and Micah Meadowcroft's fantastic (mostly positive, though more pessimistic) review; an interesting piece by Abigail Murrish on organic vs. industrial agriculture, GMOs, and what farming might look like on the New Earth, and a response by Jeffrey Bilbro which drills down into the moral roots and goals of different farming technologies by way of John Milton's Paradise Lost:

Maryanne Wolf, The Guardian, Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.
Micah Meadowcroft, Washington Free Beacon, War in the Heaven of Our Minds
Abigail Murrish, CT, Do All Plants Go to Heaven?
Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Learning to Distinguish between Demonic and Redemptive Technologies

Reviews, interviews, and other pieces related to books by people I like a lot:

Berny Belvedere, Arc Digital, Disruptive Witness: An Arc Conversation with O. Alan Noble
Jake Meador, Mere O, Book Review: Disruptive Witness by Alan Noble
Alan Noble, Christ & Pop Culture, YouVersion Bible Lens App: Mediating the Bible through Your Life
Karen Swallow Prior, CT, Why You Can't Name the Virtues
Joseph Wiebe, Front Porch Republic, Love in the Place of Almost Death
Ross Douthat, NYT, Oh, the Humanties!
Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Educating Humans to Subvert Technocracy
Robert L Kehoe III, The Point, When the Ship Has Sailed: Alan Jacobs on Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
Mark Gordon, Plough, Getting Practical with the Benedict Option

Some more reviews – first, one of Steven Pinker's new-ish book that is absolutely savage (Guilhot), and a throughly baffling one of Patrick Deneen's that is just about incomprehensible, full of assertions that seem obviously wildly untrue (no one is alienated in modernity? our products are increasing in quality without any tradeoffs? increasing per capita income is a clear indicator of a better society? come on), but with a useful reminder that some order is indeed spontaneous, and that no one's opinions should be taken for granted as unflawed (McCloskey). Thankfully, the next two are comfort food for me – a ruinous takedown of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (Eagleton), and a long reflection on Christopher Lasch's classic critique of the cult of progress on the Right and Left (McWilliams):

Nicolas Guilhot, H-Diplo, Enlightenment Now Review
Diedre Nansen McCloskey, Modern Age, Why Liberalism's Critics Fail
Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

Susan McWilliams, Modern Age, The True and Only Lasch: On The True and Only Heaven, 25 Years Later

More reviewish things, but now for poetry and TV and film: 

Clive James, The Guardian, Clive James on his new epic poem: ‘The story of a mind heading into oblivion’
Laura Turner, The Outline, Are You There, God? It's Me, The Good Place
Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker, Dystopia in 'The Good Place'
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, With Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham gives the selfie generation the portrait it deserves
Charles Bramesco, Vox, Eighth Grade’s R rating deters actual 8th-graders from seeing it. What a shame.

Some wonderful jazz writing – a review of Nate Chinen's new book (Wilson), an interview with him on reviewing live jazz and the economic struggles of jazz journalism (Cassel), and a piece he wrote on Aretha Franklin's jazz background (Chinen); a lovely history of Bill Evans through the lens of his (and the author's) obsession with the song "Nardis" (Silberman); a review of the lost Coltrane tapes that situates the recently-discovered music in his musical progression, and does some great rumination on Trane's later career and the idea of "progress" in music (Green):

Carl Wilson, Slate, Just Behind the Beat

Matthew Cassel, Longreads, The Last of the Live Reviewers: An Interview with Nate Chinen
Nate Chinen, NPR, All the Things You Are: Aretha's Life in Jazz

Steve Silberman, The Believer, Broken Time

Dominic Green, Weekly Standard, John Coltrane and the End of Jazz

And a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that doesn't fit particularly well elsewhere, as usual:

Bradford William Davis, Sojourners, Football 'Is Not of God'

Priscilla M Jensen, Weekly Standard, A Trip to Milledgeville
Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement, Where do the books belong?

John Wilson, First Things, Thinking Under the Influence
Catherine Addington, Weekly Standard, The Fashion of This World Passeth Away

Ian Frisch, Longreads, Anthony Bourdain and the Missing Piece
Sandra M Gilbert, Paris Review, The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, The Art of the Stroll
Jim McDermott, America, How newsletters can help you find your tribe and escape the chaos

Sabrina Little, I Run Far, Joy in the Storm
Rachel Manija Brown, Archive of Our Own, No Reservations: Narnia

Every article

This took forever.

I read this a few times:
Zachary Holbrook, MereO, The Toxic Environments of First Reformed

Revoice stuff:
Jack Bates, Bread, Wine, & Glitter, The Revoice Conference, Gender, and Desire
Matthew Lee Anderson, Mere Orthodoxy, Sex, Temptation, and the Gay Christian: What Chastity Demands

Ron Belgau, The Public Discourse, In Defense of Spiritual Friendship and Revoice

Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship, Where the World Attacks

Wesley Hill, Covenant, Why I Want to Stay
Ethan McCarthy, Patheos, A Tenacious Witness: Reflections on the Revoice Conference

The current President:

David A Graham, The Atlantic, Trump's Remarkable Admission About Dishonesty
Damir Marusic, Medium, The Problem of Donald Trump Didn't Start with Donald Trump

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, Abraham Lincoln's Warning

Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, America's heart of darkness

Murray Waas,  NY Review of Books, Flynn, Comey, and Mueller: What Trump Knew and When He Knew It

Immigration and family separation:
Alex Wagner, The Atlantic, Extinguishing the Beacon of America
Laura Bush, WaPo, Laura Bush: Separating children from their parents at the border ‘breaks my heart’
Ross Douthat, NYT, The Lesser Cruelty on Immigration

Alan Noble, Buzzfeed, This Is What Happens When You Say Some People Are Animals
Dara Ling, Vox, What Obama did with migrant families vs. what Trump is doing

Matthew Walther, The Week, Why Trump country is unfazed by the child separation crisis
Megan Garber, The Atlantic, How to Look Away

The Romans 13 eisegesis debacle:
Ruth Graham, Slate, Jeff Sessions Cherry-Picked a Bible Passage to Defend Trump’s Immigration Policy
Tara Isabella Burton, Vox, The racist history of the Bible verse the White House uses to justify separating families
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Sessions invents a faith all his own

Tyler Huckabee, Relevant, Jeff Sessions and the Danger of Using the Bible Instead of Letting It Use You

Reacting to Anthony Kennedy's retirement:
Alan Noble, Medium, Initial Reaction to Justice Kennedy Retirement
Ruth Graham, Slate, Amy Coney Barrett Is Allegedly a Member of a Religious Group That’s Been Called a “Cult”
Matthew Loftus, MereO, Defending the Vulnerable Requires More Than a New Supreme Court Justice

The Christian Right's dangerous alliance with Trump. Smarsh's piece doesn't quite fit here, but it goes well with McCrummen's – they temper one another:
Ruth Graham, Slate, “The Most Dangerous Place for a Child to Be Is Inside the Womb of a Woman Inside a Planned Parenthood Clinic”
Ruth Graham, Slate, Mariia Butina’s Cozy Relationship With the Christian Right Makes Total Sense

Emma Green, The Atlantic, Conservatives Are Scared, Even Under Trump

Sarah Smarsh, NYT, Liberal Blind Spots Are Hiding the Truth About 'Trump Country'

Stephanie McCrummen, WaPo, Judgement days
John Fea, The Atlantic, Evangelical Fear Elected Trump
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, CT, Fear, Power, Nostalgia, and the 81 Percent

Two articles on the recent MD primaries:

Rachel M Cohen, The Intercept, Backed by Obama Alums, a Law-and-Order Candidate Aims to Topple Progressive Leaders in Baltimore
Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, Is Ben Jealous What Progressives Want?

Racial issues:

Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
Jemar Tisby, The Witness, Why Juneteenth Should Be a National Holiday

Leilani Clark, CivilEats, Black Churches, Powerful Cultural Forces, Set Their Sights on Food Security

Environmental issues:

Roy Scranton, NYT, Raising My Child in a Doomed World
Jedidiah Purdy, Boston Review, The New Nature
Nathaniel Rich, NYT Mag, Losing Earth
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, The Problem With The New York Times’ Big Story on Climate Change

The triumphant return of the TECH EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE section:
Edward Mendelson, NY Review of Books, In the Depths of the Digital Age
Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Restoring Trust in the Aftermath of Anti-Social Media
Noah Kulwin, New York Mag, ‘One Has This Feeling of Having Contributed to Something That’s Gone Very Wrong’

Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, The Death of the Public Square

Adam J White, The New Atlantis, Google.gov

LM Sacasas, The New Atlantis, The Tech Backlash We Really Need

Gracy Olmstead, The Week, Facebook is broken. Let's all fix it together.

Kashmir Hill, Gizmodo, When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life

Erika Christakis, The Atlantic, The Dangers of Distracted Parenting
Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian, 'This is awful': robot can keep children occupied for hours without supervision

A bunch of cultural and political criticism not as directly related to the immediate political scene:
David Dark, Books & Culture, The Gospel According to America
Ryan Hammill, MereO, Against the Sterile Style
Coleson Smith, Comment, Beerbelly Elegy

BD McClay, Hedgehog Review, Virtue Signaling

Phil Christman, Hedgehog Review, What Is It Like to Be a Man?

Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, What two fictional Gileads can teach us about America in 2018

Alan Jacobs, The Guardian, To survive our high-speed society, cultivate 'temporal bandwidth'
Rachel Wiseman, The Point, Switching Off: Joseph Brodsky and the moral responsibility to be useless
Talia Lavin, Village Voice, The Moral Case for Incivility
Melvin Rogers, Boston Review, Democracy Is a Habit: Practice It
Christopher Lebron, The Nation, Up From Rawls
Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, What Can We Learn From Utopians of the Past?

Emily Rose Gum, Comment, Recovering an Institutional Imagination

James Davison Hunter & James KA Smith, Comment, The Backdrop of Reality

Lydialye Gibson, Harvard Magazine, The Democracy of Everyday Life

John Thornton, Jr, Commonweal, Under Pressure

More criticism, of literature, music, and film:
Haley Stewart, Church Life Journal, Alasdair MacIntyre Reads Jane Austen Reading Her Late Modern Reader
Kira Thurman, The Point, Singing Against the Grain: Playing Beethoven in the #BlackLivesMatter era
Trevor Quirk, The Point, The Pieces Fit: Tool's Cult of Meaning
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, Paul Schrader on First Reformed: “This is a troubling film about a troubled person”
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, The real reason we need more diversity in film criticism
Francey Russell, Boston Review, Haneke and the Technology of Intimacy
Megan N Liberty, Hyperallergic, The Clever Concrete Poetry of a Benedictine Monk
Ange Mlinko & Peter Mishler, LitHub, A Lot of My 'Process' Is Just Mucking About
Danny Heitman, Humanities, The Messy Genius of WH Auden
Emily Dreyfuss, Wired, Sacha Baron Cohen's Fake Conspiracy Site is Fully Post-Parody
Scott Timberg, LA Review of Books, The Bad Idea That Keeps On Giving
David Kolitz, The Outline, Academics Explain David Foster Wallace To Me

Walker Percy, man of the moment:

Jessica Hooten Wilson, Liberty & Law, Living as an Ex-Suicide
Randall S Rosenberg, Church Life Journal, Walker Percy and the Racist Tragedy of Southern Stoicism

Brian A Smith, The American Conservative, Walker Percy and the Gift of Influence

Christian life and commentary:
DL Mayfield, InTouch Ministries, The Ministry of Lament
Karen Swallow Prior, TGC, Christian Hospitality in an Age of ‘They’re Not Welcome Anymore, Anywhere’
Amanda Wortham, Christ & Pop Culture, How Mr Rogers's Analog Show Speaks to Us in a Digital Age
Jake Meador, MereO, The Lord's Work in the Lord's Way: Against the Culture War

Rachel Gilson, Christ & Pop Culture, David Foster Wallace and Worship in the #MeToo World

Derek Rishmawy, TGC, You Want a God of Judgement
Jasmine Holmes, Fathom, So You Hate Biblical Womanhood

Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Ben Myers's The Apostles' Creed Reminds Us of Our Roots
BD McClay, Commonweal, Problems Like Maria
Dante Stewart, CT, Why the Enslaved Adopted the Religion of Their Masters – and Transformed It

Cameron McAllister, Christ & Pop Culture, When Your ‘Story’ Gets in the Way of Your Testimony: Lessons from Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering

Alan's book Disruptive Witness came out this month:
Alan Noble, CT, How to Witness to a Distracted World
Alan Noble, Fathom, Disruptive Conversations
Lauren M Fabrycky, Fathom, Bearing Witness In a Distracted World
Justin Bailey, In All Things, Bearing Witness in a TLDR World: A Review of “Disruptive Witness”
Jonathan Merritt, Jonathan Merritt on Faith & Culture, The Christian Call to be Culturally Disruptive?

Some paired pieces that didn't fit well elsewhere: 2 from Taffy; 2 on American waste and wealth; 2 on #PlaneBae; 2 on translation; 2 on the shortcomings of modern sexual activism:
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NYT Mag, Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NYT Mag, How Goop's Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow's Company Worth $250 Million
Matthew Walther, The Week, American wasteland
Micah Meadowcroft, National Review, Riches Unto Death: Poverty Is a Lack of More Than Money
Megan Garber, The Atlantic, Two Strangers Met on a Plane – and the Internet Ruined It
Ella Dawson, elladawson.com, We Are All Public Figures Now
Burke Gertenschlager & Ed Simon, LA Review of Books, Groping Towards Each Other In a Common Mist
Rachel Hadas, Literary Matters, On Translation

Ross Douthat, NYT, The Handmaids of Capitalism
Brandon McGinley, First Things, Her Name Is Monroe Christine

Individual pieces that didn't fit elsewhere:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her Catholic faith and the urgency of a criminal justice reform
Philip Jenkins, Patheos, Faith, Fertility, and the Fate of American Religion
Grace Akello, LSE Africa, From ‘saved’ to secularised: the challenges facing former LRA fighters after reintegration into their communities

Annie Lowery, The Atlantic, Are Stock Buybacks Hurting the Economy?

Alan Jacobs, Weekly Standard, Understanding the Beautiful Game

Matthew Loftus, Plough, The Medicated Soul

June came upon us

This week's roundup (two weeks? three? I don't know, I started this collection a week ago) follows a similar pattern to a few posts back. Our political situation is pretty bad. Our President has sub-adolescent levels of self-control (Karni) and a political ideology that cannot ascend past brute vulgarity (Goldberg). The crowing celebrities of the ostensible other side isn't far behind in this race to the bottom (Gilbert). This is the age of charlatans (Ganz):
Annie Karni, Politico, Meet the guys who tape Trump's papers back together
Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: ‘We’re America, Bitch’
Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, Robert DeNiro’s Toothless Protest
John Ganz, NYT, Why We Are So Vulnerable to Charlatans Like Trump

It isn't just the political situation that's bad. Two celebrity suicides and a chilling new study brought suicide forward in our national conversation (Dvorak). What does this say about the state of our culture (Powers)? And how can we be considerate to people who have lost loved ones while discussing this important issue (Feinberg)?
Petula Dvorak, WaPo, Will we finally end the silence around suicide?
Kirsten Powers, USA Today, Americans are depressed and suicidal because something is wrong with our culture
Ashley Feinberg, Huffington Post, My Suicide Week

Despite the sorrowful occasion, I was glad to be introduced to the life of Tony Bourdain through several loving remembrances, which drew me to start seeking out his own work. As many things I read these past few weeks have reflected, we need to cultivate the courage to encounter differing people and cultures, and to embrace difference with humility; Bourdain seems like a heroic figure in this regard. A terrible loss:
Helen Rosner, New Yorker, Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth
Sarah Condon, Mockingbird, On Anthony Bourdain: We Were Not Made to Be Famous
Kendall Vanderslice, Christ & Pop Culture, Anthony Bourdain Taught Us About Breaking Bread in a Broken World
David Simon, The Audacity of Despair, Tony
Anthony Bourdain, New Yorker, Don't Eat Before Reading This

More coverage of the reckoning facing the American Church w/r/t sex abuse. Harris's piece, in particular, really drills down into how churches find themselves obliviously complicit in abusers' plans and become negligent toward their victims: 

Molly Worthen, NYT, Sex and Gender on the Christian Campus
Michelle Boorstein & Sarah Pulliam Bailey, WaPo, How women led to the dramatic rise and fall of Southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson
Kimberly Harris, CT, Sex Offenders Groom Churches Too

Hermeisha Hopson, CT, Q&A: We Need a Christ-Centered Theology of Trauma

The upcoming Revoice conference has generated a generally depressing controversy about whether celibate gay Christians are adequately abased in their long challenge to find ways to (as Eve puts it) "express and receive love" while adhering to traditional Christian interpretations of sexual ethics. Most of it has failed to rise even to the level of "uncharitable." Wedgeworth, to his credit, probes somewhat deeper than his fellow critics while maintaining a fair-minded tone, but fails to honestly represent his interlocutors, approach issues from an angle seeking better understanding, or present any potential solutions to theological questions he raises. Matthew's short response to him gets at a few of these issues, while Eve's general response to the controversy as a whole (plus an older post on gay identity from 2012) provide a much-needed (and hilarious) counterpoint. There's also a piece from Vice with an outside look on these "Side B" Christians – not a great piece (it has a very "come look at this curiosity!" vibe), but it does at kkleast put their voices in the foreground with minimal commentary:
Steven Wedgeworth, MereO, A Critical Review of Spiritual Friendship
Matthew Loftus, MereO: Doctors Without Boredom, Philia and Eros: Sloppy Wet Kissing Cousins
Eve Tushnet, Blogspot, The Name of the Miracle of the Rose
Eve Tushnet, Patheos, There’s a Place for Us: Revoice and Gay Christian Futures
Eve Tushnet, Patheos, There’s a Place for Us Part II: More on Revoice & Gay Christian Homemaking
Sam Nichols, Vice, The Openly Gay Christians Swearing Off Sex for Jesus

Right now, our government is doing what may be the worst thing they've done in our country in my life (we've done worse elsewhere, and maybe worse here, but I haven't thought of anything I've lived through). The separation of immigrant families is an incredible evil. Robinson is appropriately excoriating towards the religious conservatives failing to call evil what it is. Mayfield targets more specifically, writing an open letter to Focus on the Family, who has yet to respond. (Her Comment piece on suburbia and the way neighborhoods are constructed to enforce isolation is not exactly on the same issue, but it's great). 
Marilynne Robinson, The Guardian, A moral crisis grips the US border. Yet the religious right is shamefully silent
DL Mayfield, NowSheRises, An Open Letter to Focus on the Family/President Jim Daly
DL Mayfield, Comment, The Architecture of Loneliness in Immigrant Communities

More recently, the administration has appealed to Romans 13 to justify their actions in tearing families apart. This is appalling and theologically wrong, as many here have noted:
Alan Jacobs, Snakes and Ladders, The Whole of the Law
Fleming Rutledge, Generous Orthodoxy: Ruminations, Between the Two Thirteens
Matthew Loftus, MereO, Romans 13, Jeff Sessions, and Separating Families at the Border

Christian political priorities are changing, between traditions (Gjelten) and within denominations (Leeman & McKissic). We need a deeper understanding of how the Church should relate to the State (Tran, reviewing Jamie Smith) and the distinctions between them (Meador, responding to Moser): 

Tom Gjelten, NPR, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals Move Farther Apart in Their Political Priorities

Jonathan Leeman, TGC, Truth, Power, and Pence at the SBC

Dwight McKissic, CT, The Case for Electing Beth Moore as President of the Southern Baptist Convention

Jonathan Tran, LARB: Marginalia, Trump and the Specter of Christian Withdrawal

Brett Moser, TGC, The (False) Promise of Small-Town Community
Jake Meador, MereO: Commonplaces, What do we mean by "community"?

America has forgot the virtues of forgiveness and humility (Bruenig), to the extent that even Mr Rogers seems like a radical with his vast reserve of compassion (Wilkinson). We need to recover this sense of humility, as a country (Dark) and as a Church (McCloud). The Church, if it truly longs for renewal, must stop trying to police others so much (Jacobs) and focus more on not being hypocritical itself (Anderson). We do not need to have huge numbers or shiny equipment to be discipled and to be a light in the world (Bird); we might get farther by committing to hospitality to our neighbors (Lundgren). Indeed, it is in loving and welcoming our neighbors that we express our love and welcome for God's presence (Lee):
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, We are no longer capable of forgiving our enemies
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, The Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor feels radically subversive
David Dark, America, In the age of Trump, can Mr. Rogers help us manage our anger?
Catherine Addington, MereO, Lessons from Valladolid: On Being Decent in an Indecent Age
Ian McCloud, Fathom, A Cure for the Church

Alan Jacobs, Snakes and Ladders, Seeds of Renewal
Matthew Lee Anderson, Medium, What Faithful Presence Demands

Chad Bird, TGC, God Loves Your Messy, Unimpressive Church
Laura Lundgren, Fathom, Cracking the Code on Hospitality

John Lee, CT, Entertaining More Than Angels

Christian thinkers like Andy Crouch have been discussing the need for discipleship to filter down into the culture and workplaces for years (Zylstra); it should go without saying, though, that this should not just be a retreading of inequalities present in the Church, as it has been in places like Silicon Valley (Starke). We also need art that brings us out of our utilitarian workplace mindsets, and orient us to transcendence rather than productivity (Casper). Unfortunately, most mainstream movies marketed to Christians are shallow pandering (Rothkopf):

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, TGC, Andy Crouch and the Culture Makers
Rachael Starke, Fathom, Not good for man to work alone?
Mark Casper, Mockingbird, The Role of Art (Or, the Limitations of Self-Help) in Life and Work

Joanna Rothkopf, Jezebel, A Journey Into the Righteous, Risk-Averse World of Faith-Based Films

And that's why we need movies like Paul Schrader's First Reformed:  AO Scott, NYT, Review: 'First Reformed' Is a Marvel. Ethan Hawke Is, Too.
Ann Hornaday, WaPo, This new movie gets right everything that 'Mother!' got wrong
Kenneth R Morefield, CT, 'First Reformed' Imagines a Stunning Dark Night of the Soul
Brett McCracken, TGC, 'First Reformed': 2018's Most Thought-Provoking Film So Far
Steven D Graydanus, National Catholic Register, SDG Reviews 'First Reformed'
Josh Larsen, Larsen on Film, First Reformed
Kevin Lincoln, First Reformed, Let's Talk About the Ending of 'First Reformed'
John Ehrett, The American Conservative, A Hollywood Movie About Christianity Worth Seeing

Getting back to humility, we need to have the courage and charity to read our political and cultural opponents' foundational material in a way that allows to see whatever worth there may be in it, or at least see why it attracts them (Corbin). Many haven't done this with Jordan Peterson's work (myself perhaps included), preferring instead to present a convenience caricature to fit a preconceived narrative (Yang). Of course, this doesn't preclude reading Peterson (or anyone else) critically, and seeing trends and histories behind their work (Burton). But writing off someone's work because of distasteful fans alienates those fans unnecessarily – not to mention, it makes the fans that don't fit that narrative invisible and renders their perspectives silent (Ritchey). There are many ways we can pursue thinking and reading together, and this is worth being intentional about (McEntyre).

Ian Marcus Corbin, Weekly Standard, Reading Dangerously
Wesley Yang, Tablet, The Shocking Truth About Jordan Peterson
Tara Isabella Burton, Vox, The religious hunger that drives Jordan Peterson's fandom
Jessica Ritchey, Mel Magazine, You’re Doing Women No Favors With Your Mocking ‘Ugh, Only Straight White Men Like This’ Takes
Marilyn McEntyre, Medium, Reading Together

Certainly we should all be reading more Solzhenitsyn:

Jeff Groom, The American Conservative, 40 Years Ago Today: When Solzhenitsyn Schooled Harvard
Robert P George, First Things, Solzhenitsyn's Prophecy

And reading more theology:
Eugene F Rivers III, Plough, Powers and Principalities: King and the Holy Spirit

David Bentley Hart, Church Life Journal, A Prayer for the Poor
Julia Smucker, Church Life Journal, A Prayer for the Rich?
Karen Swallow Prior, CT, Sin Is Like Walking in Front of a Bus
Andrew Wilson, CT, Whatever Happened to Gifts of Language, Prophecy, and Healing?

And reading more deeply in the humanities:
Natalie Elliot, The New Atlantis, Shakespeare's Worlds of Science
Vladislav Davidzon, Tablet, In Memory of Isaiah Berlin
Rebecca McLaughlin, TGC, The Enlightenment Improved the Wold – But Not without Christianity
Jamelle Bouie, Slate, The Enlightenment's Dark Side

Three more pairs of pieces, on smartphones and motherhood and jazz, and a final miscellaneous article on copyediting:
Sarah Puryear, Covenant, Why I Gave Up My Smartphone for Lent – And Took It Back
Kate Shellnutt, CT, Go Tell It on the iPhone
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, To my daughter, who taught me not to worry about time
Courtney Ressig, TGC, When Motherhood Feels Like Death
John Murph, Downbeat, Todd Marcus Merges Jazz and Activism
Giovanni Russonello, NYT, Lost John Coltrane Recording From 1963 Will Be Released at Last
Karen Ostergren, The Atlantic, How to Copyedit The Atlantic