Publications
Essays
Front Porch Republic
The Theological Problem of the “Choosy Womb”, Part 1: An Honest Look at Spontaneous Abortion
How should we morally evaluate or rank the various choices we make that lead to embryo death? Any and every sexually active woman is physically responsible for the creation and destruction of embryos—regardless of her feelings, desires, intentions, and awareness. The only way to prevent all embryo loss would be to stop trying to reproduce (by any means) and to stop having sex. Period. Our religious intuitions on the sanctity of life are difficult to square with the “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel” lottery of sexual reproduction in an evolving world.
The Theological Problem of the “Choosy Womb”, Part 2: Hospitality in a Botanical Paradigm
The only way to understand the meaning of both pregnancy and abortion is to understand the meaning of miscarriage, to recognize and accept it as a form of death that is inherent to the process of procreation and the way women’s bodies are designed to work. Embracing the traditional botanical paradigm for early pregnancy is the best way that I know to cope with what my body is like, that I am both fruitful and choosy at the same time no matter how I feel about it, and the combination of this openness and closedness is a mark of health and not a curse.
Gendered Worlds: Our Need for Belonging and Usefulness
If we choose to befriend our many obligations — to connect with other people, to love, to serve, to create, to borrow, to lend, to repair, to celebrate, to support — instead of buying a product or a service — then we are cultivating fertile ground for a healthy form of gendered cooperation to (perhaps) re-emerge.
Christian Research Journal
Is Everybody Traumatized, and Do We All Need Therapy?
The modern economy amputates communal bonds that once formed our identities; therapy compensates like a clinical prosthesis. The intersection of modern medicine, consumer capitalism, and a problem-solving approach to pain has led to the rise of therapy as a market solution.
What Happened to the word “WOMAN”?
That which used to go without saying is now being said in a way that implies its opposite. “To define is to limit,” Oscar Wilde wrote, and to limit is to exclude. Exclusion has become the root of all evils: this is why the definitions of man and woman are becoming, in queer theorist Judith Butler’s words, a “permanently available site of contested meanings.”
Carl Jung and the Modern World’s Wound
Jung saw a gaping wound in the modern human soul, and he addressed it with psychoanalysis, perhaps making things worse, perhaps better (that’s arguable). But what isn’t arguable is the wound itself. Jung’s project reveals that desacramentalized religion cannot make humans whole: the unconscious doesn’t disappear just because churches cease to tend to it.
Beautiful Union by Joshua Ryan Butler and the Trouble with Borrowing Icons
Evangelicals missed what Butler was trying to say about the divinely iconic nature of marital sex, and instead heard something not only “gross” and theologically incorrect, but dark and dangerous. What Butler meant and what people heard were different; the reasons for this difference are emblematic of evangelicalism and worth understanding.
Raised by Wolves: The Temptation and Trauma of an Android Eve
Raised by Wolves draws on the ancient story of Eve, while moving the myth into uncanny, alien territory. If an android could transcend its code, what would it want? Could its naive desires and biases be exploited? What temptations would a self-aware AI face? What happens when the maternal impulse is wedded to a machine?
Salt and Iron
How Our Intellectual Appetites Make Us Vulnerable to Existential Risk: Part One, Part Two, Part Three
This is the corruption of our intellectual appetite: the desire to master the world as a god — not by creation but by conquest. Curiosity seeks new knowledge as an object to be controlled, consumed, and owned. The objectifying and hungry gaze of the curious is at odds with a construal of the world as a gift.
From Carl Jung to Jesus Christ: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four
People in midlife don’t need a new car, a new lover, or a new job. They need a new self, one that contains more of reality, a self that is balanced and whole. “To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock,” Jung admitted, and “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
Safety Not Guaranteed: A Christian’s Coming to Terms with Evolution
My Christian faith has been changed and thickened by the shock that evolution was to my system — much like bones and muscles are strengthened by exercise. I may be stronger now, and I hope a little braver, but to be honest, I’m still sore.
Curiosity, Courage, and Compassion in the Underworld
I didn’t have a place for crisis within my picture of the Christian life. I’d assumed that trusting in Christ for salvation and embracing the Bible as God’s true guidance would function like a vaccine against existential chaos. I conceded that shock and disintegration could be features of a pre-Christian life, but once you believe, aren’t you immune?
A Meditation on the Face of God
I must have looked at hundreds of images spanning centuries: from highly venerated icons made by the ancient church, mosaics, and baroque paintings, to works made by contemporary iconographers. One aspect kept catching my eye: Christ’s forehead.
Weaving: The Secret of Life
“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life, and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth…” Rilke’s love poem embodies the virtue dearest to my heart: the decision to view the circumstances of one’s life with gratitude, to hold the disparate, unchosen threads and bravely weave them into a good life.
Christ and Pop Culture
Women, Gender, Marriage, and Sex
Responding to What Is a Woman?, Part 1: It’s Too Simple for Words
The categories of male/female and man/woman are simply too ancient and fundamental to be tampered with without consequences.
Responding to What Is a Woman?, Part 2: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone
Without tradition to protect us, our bodies become subject to the dynamics of the market.
Responding to What Is a Woman?, Part 3: “It Sucks to Be a Girl”
While many of women’s problems are age-old, what’s changed is the promise of a new solution: the promise of escaping womanhood by adopting a new identity.
A Better Version of Yourself? Self-Obsession in The Substance
If our takeaway from The Substance is yet another lament about Hollywood’s impossible beauty standards for women, then we’ve let ourselves off the hook.
Sex Ed Through Stories: Helping Our Kids Acquire Healthy Shame
Surrounded by a world of shameless porn and an attitude in the church that sees all shame as unhealthy, we need to remember that it is a holy thing, a beautiful thing, to blush.
Why Marry? Marcia A. Zug’s You’ll Do Explores the Strange and Surprising Reasons (Part 1)
I never knew that American marriages had such a checkered history.
Marrying for Love? Marcia A. Zug’s You’ll Do and the Problem of Marital Privilege (Part 2)
We keep on using the word “marriage,” but it no longer means what we think it means.
Indian Matchmaking: What’s It Like to Look for Love the Old-Fashioned Way?
Netflix’s hit reality TV series reveals how many of our beliefs and practices regarding marriage are time-bound historical phenomena, not unchanging universal ideals.
Why You Need to Re-Watch While You Were Sleeping
While You Were Sleeping is unusual for this genre because it shows the necessity of both family and shame for the storied couple’s well-being.
“Because You Let Me.” The Horror of Speak No Evil, Niceness, and Complacent Men
Speak No Evil starkly portrays the point at which niceness becomes a weapon in the hands of those cruel and clever enough to wield it.
The Making of Biblical Womanhood and the Missing Mother of God (Part 1)
When the highest feminine symbol within church history was rejected as an idol, a primary example of women’s indisputable dignity disappeared too.
The Making of Biblical Womanhood and the Missing Mother of God (Part 2)
Celibate monasticism was a symbol of the radical resurrection equality of men and women—of their symmetrical status as eternal brothers and sisters.
Sex and the City of God by Carolyn Weber
In Sex and the City of God, Carolyn Weber shows us the merciful (yet painful) process of Christ re-ordering her loves and directing her paths.
Science and Technology
My Dear Wormwood: A Screwtape Letter on the Art of Smartphone Addiction
Neutrality towards technology isn’t as good as enthusiasm, of course, but it’s much better than allowing the seeds of skepticism to grow.
“All Things Change, Nothing Perishes”—The Body in Annihilation
The horror of this story is the annihilation of identity, the erosion of a personal self that has a recognizable shape.
Raised by Wolves: The Temptation and Trauma of an Android Eve
Raised by Wolves shows us a world where the tools we’ve fashioned (AI) are placed in the position of fashioning us.
How Not to Die: Listening to Trees as Old as Jesus
In both the Word and the world — in spirit and in body — trees sustain us with a grace we don’t deserve.
Transcending Evolution: Love and Death in Spring
Spring suggests that to be truly human is to love in a manner that transcends any evolutionary roots.
Theology and Virtue Ethics
It’s a Festival, Not a Machine: Celebrating The Symbolic World
Jonathan Pageau’s channel, The Symbolic World, provides a means for the baptism of the evangelical imagination into this symbolic life.
Why Truth-Loving Christians Still Have a B.S. Problem (and What We Can Do about It)
We need to learn how to cut through the B.S. and un-deceive ourselves daily to gain a clearer vision of both God and the world.
Oh Fudge! Why We Swear and What it Means
There are times when, to properly name evil as evil, only the worst of words will do.
Station Eleven: Why We Long for the Clarity of Disaster and the Safety of Home
Station Eleven focuses on the clarity that the pandemic’s disaster affords, and the way people re-make their sense of “home” after the damage.
Station Eleven: The Virtue of Helping Even When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing Healing doesn’t require a degree. But it does require a willingness to share someone’s suffering.
Station Eleven: The Virtue of Risky Hospitality and Making Monsters into Friends
Rebuilding civilization requires hospitality to strangers, whether they show up cold and dirty on your doorstep, or warm and tiny in your womb.
Station Eleven: The Virtue of Being an Artist and Answering Death with Beauty
At the heart of Station Eleven is a conflict between affirmation of Life and negation of Life. Affirmation wins.
Movies and Music
The Beautiful Community and Brutal Scapegoating in The Peasants
This 2023 animated adaptation of the acclaimed Polish novel highlights the tension between tradition and community, and modern individualism.
Dune and Disaster, or, Why Charismatic Leaders Should Come with a Warning Label
Like Paul in Dune, we can fall into the trap of moral expediency — the temptation to care more about winning than about holiness and humble service.
Unveiling the Great Women Behind Dune: Part Two’s Great Men
If anyone is inclined to take away from this film the message that men shouldn’t listen to women because they’re shameless manipulators, then they’ve missed the point.
The Spy Film That’s Better Than Bond, or, Why I Watched Tenet Four Times
This reciprocal, mutual mentoring is possible only because of time inversion, proving that Tenet’s sci-fi premise is no mere gimmick. The story’s moral core depends on it.
Ray LaMontagne’s Imagination: A Timely Salve in a Troubled Season
Music like Ray LaMontagne’s can play a part in tuning our hearts to this holy grammar all around us.
Humor and Humility in the Music of Father John Misty
No matter his graphic language, depression-stoked benders, and religious satire, Father John Misty still orbits Christianity with a gravity he can’t escape.
Will Ferrell’s Eurovision Tribute: How to Save the World by Laughing at Yourself
The Story of Fire Saga shows us how to mature past win-lose games into a form of infinite play that values process and relationships over victory.
Ashes to Ashes, Stardust to Stardust: Watching Sunshine during a Pandemic
A good story doesn’t make you feel more afraid than you were before; a good story helps you see the best way to act in the midst of your anxious fear, providing you with hope.
Finding God in Godless
Godless treats the subject of God’s absence not in propositional statements, but rather the embodied, existential answer of lives well-lived.
Audio
Podcast Interviews
Alisa Ruddell on Women’s Ordination (Church Coffee: Christianity, Conservatism, and Culture)
The Trouble with Borrowing Icons & Beautiful Union by Josh Butler (Postmodern Realities Podblast)
What Happened to the Word “WOMAN”? (Postmodern Realities Podcast)
Carl Jung, the Loss of Liturgy, and the Modern World’s Wound (Postmodern Realities Podcast)
Is Everybody Traumatized & Do We All Need Therapy? (Postmodern Realities Podcast)
Raised by Wolves (HBO MAX) REVIEW (Postmodern Realities Podcast)
Classes
Saints of Whom the World Was Not Worthy: Mary, the Mother of Jesus (Trinity Presbyterian Church Adult Education)
The Structure of the Kingdom of God: The Inevitability of Hierarchy (and How We Handle It) (Trinity Presbyterian Church, The Hub