Bearings Online19 November 2020 Dear Malcolm Gladwell, It is too bad that the malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com website doesn’t work anymore. I hope you enjoyed the gentle ribbing back in the day. Your well-crafted books— The Tipping Point, Blink—offered big ideas with catchy titles, and became so culturally ascendent as to earn the backhanded praise of parody. Me?…
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Where Have You Gone, Malcolm Gladwell?
We Are All Monks Now
Bearings OnlineApril 7, 2020 So here we are, mostly inside, self-isolated to help stop the Covid-19 pandemic, cloistered as it were. Even libertarians and other individualists realize they are social creatures. Catholics miss all the more the materiality — the smell of incense, the touch when passing the peace, the taste of bread and wine…
The Mystery in Ordinary Churches
Bearings OnlineNovember 5, 2019 If only they would restore a sense of mystery to the Mass, Catholics could put God first and the Church could find its way back to vibrancy. So goes the argument from Catholic traditionalists. And so far so good. But mystery has its own mysterious ways. Unless we discern mystery amid…
Putting Lent back into Christmas
Bearings Online6 December 2018 The commercialization of Christmas is old news. The war against Christmas is fake news. The wringing of hands is wrung out. Yet still the Christmas Muzak drones on: Santa’s reindeer has run over grandma again this year. The real tragedy, though, is that according to the premature Christmas carols we cannot…
Why Believe in God? To Live Inside a Poem
Bearings Online4 October 2018 There comes a time in almost any undergraduate theology class when professors like me must respond to the question: Why believe? This may come as a surprise to those who think theology professors pressure students to believe through catechesis and apologetics or, on the contrary, covertly aim to strip students of…
Things I’ve Learned from Fundamentalists
Bearings Online7 May 2018 A few of the things that fundamentalist preachers tried to teach me in my youth keep coming back to me. I wonder what it is about our current historical moment that is doing that. Hmm – what could it be? Like many earnest young Christians growing up within range of American…
Works-Righteousness and the Politics of Virtue Signaling
Bearings Online 22 Febuary 2018 Last fall many commemorated Martin Luther’s sparking of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago when, in his 95 Theses posted on October 31, 1517, he attacked “works-righteousness.” Luther confidently expected that rejecting “works-righteousness” in favor of grateful trust in God would actually free Christians to do more and truer good…
Exiles all: Going “all in” on immigration reform
Bearings Online 10 August 2017 You know the headlines: Globalization. Jobs lost, jobs gained. Immigrants. Muslims. Nationalist resurgence both in the United States and other countries. Calls to “build that wall.” Charges of xenophobia. Outsourcing that hurts “us” and sweatshops that hurt “them.” The internet, creating both links between people and echo chambers for the…
Playing the long game
Bearings Online 5 May 2017 Long before President Barack Obama and hundreds of pundits popularized the notion of “playing the long game” in seeking societal change, a 1917 editorial in the Times Literary Supplement stated: “The long game is the Church’s game.” Having only seen this quote second hand, I do not know what exactly…