The Little Match Girl: An Atonement Theory
But there’s no escaping the story’s deep sorrow, the feeble light of a match against winter, against poverty, against human indifference and cruelty.
God Wants You To Be Warm
I’d frozen my face into a wide-eyed expression of mild panic, but I was upright.
Best of 2025, Part One: Writers’ Picks
To truly love something you’ve written yourself is a both an achievement and a gift.
Gradvent
Perhaps then your recommendation letter will arrive via carrier pigeon.
Driving to Page
I sent dozens of photos to my grandparents’ electronic photo frame.
For SARS-CoV-2, Apply 8 Oz.
Even I am not enough of an instruction fundamentalist to get a measuring cup out while cleaning the toilet.
Confessions of a Wedding Hater
Bible passages, sermons, vows, unity candles, unity candle alternatives (beer-based)—I’ve got something to say about all of it.
What Died Didn’t Stay Dead: A Taylor Swift Worship Experience: Holy Week Edition
She can come to the phone right now, because if she has died, she has also risen.
How to Take Graduate Courses (For Far Too Long)
For all the pious academic talk about deep and careful reading, our fields run on quick glances and hurried skims.
The Other Grammys
The piece is therefore about both an escape from the material and a return to it: its horn calls and dance rhythms are both earthbound and transcendent.
Bookstore Mystery Fodder
When I see these things in a real bookstore, I could be convinced there’s a conspiracy afoot.
Best of 2024, Part Two: Peers’ Picks
Our hope for the post calvin is that writing does not feel like shouting into the void.
Takes
It’s a kind of mental treadmill, a sprint that doesn’t get me anywhere except tired.
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: The Post
That mirrorverse that convinces us that the only way to love something is to dissect it.
By Grace
Luck doesn’t prove virtue.
Rhapsody in Blue
Who knows what lurks in the catacombs of Spotify if you search “jazzy organ”?
Purity Is Misery
I don’t know what “knowledge is merely daylight masquerading as God” means, but it sure sounds true.
Burning
From this vantage point, a few tax credits for home solar panels (imagine owning a home!) doesn’t feel like hope.
The One-Way Speed of Light
Is God deceiving us? Maybe!
My Favorite Disney Song
If I was magically transported to the 1982 EPCOT Center, I think I’d know how to get around.
Best of 2023, Part Two: Editors’ Picks
The best posts are the ones that remind us why this place keeps going.
It Came Upon a Midnight(s) Clear: A Taylor Swift Worship Experience: Christmas Edition
Congregational eye-rolling intensifies.
October 8, T.A. 3018 (Year 1418 in Shire-reckoning)
No doubt a historical trigonometrist could measure the percentage of Weathertop that fell below the horizon each hour, though that study has yet to be published.
Framed
When I picked it up in disbelief, the beautiful initial N stared (yes, manuscripts can stare) into my soul.
An Autobiography in Favorite Books
Is it such a bad thing to stop reading a book like scripture and start reading it like a book?
Where There’s Smoke
No wonder my eyes sting when I go outside; the air’s full of tiny demonic scorpions.
Papers I Didn’t Write in Seminary
Sin, in other words, might be where the rubber meets the road.
The Darkness of God: A Nighttime Liturgy
Conspiracies form at night. So do revolutions.
The City at the End of the World
Two monuments then, intertwined: one to wonders and another to horrors.
Lone Woolf
“I’ve tried this book before,” said I, “with the success of a sore-legged predator. It stings and slogs in a circus of circumlocutions.”
