Category Culture
Beyond Christianity, Part 2
A friend on Facebook recently posted a Fox News video about “liberal agitators” at a Trump rally. Being that this was from Fox News, the agitators they chose to show were not particularly articulate. I was milliseconds away from forgetting all about it until I saw this comment beneath the video: “They’re being paid to […]
Beyond Christianity
For those of you who’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I spend a lot of time thinking about modern morality. If you haven’t been following along but still want to be one of the cool kids, you can check out this or this or this or, if you’re feeling super […]
The Face of Oppression is Positively Adorable
While walking to my local grocery last Wednesday I found four hamsters in a trash pile. Unfortunately, two had already died and the other two looked like they were well on the way to freezing. I don’t really think of myself as the sort of person who has hamsters, but I also wasn’t going to […]
Ghost Town Exploration
With all the casinos defining Reno’s skyline, and the gambling halls studding the main drag of almost any small town in Nevada, it’s easy to forget how our state began—mines. More specifically, Nevada began as a source of financing for the Union during the Civil War. Like Liberia with its conflict diamonds, our silver helped […]
The Doomed Moralists, Part Two
In Part One of the Doomed Moralists, I argued that a moral practice becomes good because it makes a society more powerful. I don’t want to restate too much, but I took the view that good and bad are constantly evolving concepts that are always tested in the crucible of competition. Fellow writer Malcolm Greenhill […]
The Doomed Moralists
I recently had the opportunity to sample The Partially Examined Life’s Robert Nozick episode and IQsquared’s Karl Marx discussion. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less and less amenable to both Nozick’s libertarianism and Marx’s, well, Marxism. It might just be early onset curmudgeon, perhaps blind prejudice but I’m going to at least try to […]
Harems
Dear Readers, I’m writing the next novel and it’s going to be heavy on issues of femininity and masculinity. I’m interested in how masculinity changes shape with each step up the social ladder, particularly the idea that one of the most woman-friendly things a king or powerful man can do is doink everything that moves […]
Explaining Donald Trump
I had initially dismissed Donald Trump as the random crazy person that Republicans rapidly fall in love with and then out of love with during some stage of every election cycle. Pat Robertson, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry, please step up to the podium, in other words. This still might be true, but I now […]
An Open Letter to the World’s Missionaries
Dear Missionaries, I’d like to say that, generally, I like you guys. I invite you guys into my house because I like to talk to you, I like to talk about theology and I even like talking about the Bible. And honestly, every time you stop me on the street or corner me at a […]
Wine Tasting
I’ve been sitting on this story for almost a year. When I made my first draft, I envisioned it as an examination of fear. In other words, an adventure story wrapped in pretentious sweaters. I kept trying and trying to make this sort of article coherent and I failed. I’m pretty sure I failed because […]
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