Benjamin J. Dueholm

In Burton's debut novel, Louise and Lavinia represent the possibility that compulsive self-disclosure is a form of self-concealment.

I am finally old enough to admit something: the mysteries of adulthood, those "mature themes" we try to hide from the young, are mostly stupid.

Isaiah’s suffering servant plays on our own ambivalent ideas about violence, passivity, and retribution.

A worshiper can go a long time without any idea of who Melchizedek is and what it means to be a priest according to his order.

Humility isn't a stunt for Jesus—it's a condition of his life.

In the hours before the Passion, the Jesus who was hidden becomes revealed.

The crucified Jesus in John's Gospel is cosmic—and magnetic.

The senator's jokes are still funny, even if Trump has made his satire obsolete.

Critics are correct that Robinson doesn't offer an alternative to the Christian Right. But she never claimed to. 

No president knew the literature and religion of America better—not even Lincoln.

Leonard Cohen's spiritual side had an erotic edge—and an eschatological one.

Understanding an election requires stories. Last night, our stories proved inadequate.

American civil religion is dead, to paraphrase Nietzsche. We have killed it.

When I parked the minivan in the church lot, it still sounded like the type of horror we have had no choice but to become stoic about: 20 dead in a bar, as many more wounded, a dead shooter and a thicket of questions. By the time I returned it had become something different.

The apocalypse, it seems, is cultural and psychological rather than historical. One can only hope that this theory is right.

Plato, it is said, confronted Diogenes as the great Cynic philosopher washed his greens for dinner. “If you had humored Dionysius”—the tyrant of Syracuse who had called Plato as an adviser—”you wouldn’t be rinsing greens now.” Diogenes answered him, “And if you rinsed greens, you wouldn’t have been a slave to Dionysius.”

This week, the National Review published a statement to Catholics opposing Donald Trump’s campaign for president. Authored by right-wing eminences George Weigel and Robert George, and cosigned by an impressive list of Catholic intellectuals and leaders, the document joins a body of anti-Trump literature that is coming into its own stentorian rhetorical conventions.

Something subtle and remarkable has happened in American politics—and, it seems, in democracies across the developed world. The big arguments over what the state owes the people, in terms of services and public welfare, have been somewhat eclipsed. Now the focus is on who counts as people in the first place.

Writing at a safe remove from the fever swamps and the hate crimes—without, in fact, even mentioning them—Ross Douthat argues that pious Muslims must inevitably face conflict between the “lure of conquest, the pull of violent jihad” and the ambiguous, unsettled place of traditional religion in a secularizing culture.

The state of U.S. politics makes it tempting to throw energy behind a messianic bid for the presidency. It also makes this a dubious strategy.