What is happening in Evangelical land? C.S. Lewis and space aliens A review of two new documentaries about evangelicalism. Karen Swallow Prior on Tim Alberta’s new book: Anglican evangelicals on the Uganda anti-LGBTQ policy. Not all evangelicals believe women should […]
Archives for June 2023
The Author’s Corner with Benjamin Jenkins
Benjamin Jenkins is Associate Professor of History and University Archivist at the University of La Verne. This interview is based on his new book, Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California (University Press of Kansas, 2023). JF: What […]
REVIEW: Nothing but Blue Skies?
We need eye-opening speculative fiction more than ever
Juneteenth: letters from free people
What was it like to experience the first taste of freedom after a lifetime in slavery? Two letters from 1865 help to answer that question by showing both the jubilation that formerly enslaved people experienced immediately after emancipation and the […]
Sunday night odds and ends
A few things online that caught my attention this week: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen reviews two new book on failure. When you find out that your church was part of the slave trade. Stephen Brumwell reviews Brady J. Crytzer’s The Whiskey Rebellion: […]
Episode 112: “The Search for God in a New York Publishing House”
Have you ever heard someone say that they were “spiritual,” but not “religious?” Our guest in this episode, Stephen Prothero, offers a “pre-history” of this idea. According to Prothero, the move from traditional/institutional/confessional “religion” to seeker “spirituality” runs through the […]
Cornel West explains his “jazz man” presidential candidacy
Here is West’s conversation with writer and Presbyterian minister Christopher Hedges: Some key West quotes from the Hedges interview: “I’ve always viewed myself as a jazz man in the world of ideas as well as a jazz man in politics, […]
The Dispatch to Republicans: “Say in public those things about Donald Trump that you so often say in private”
The Dispatch is a conservative anti-Trump online political magazine. Earlier this week it released a rare editorial. The subject is Donald Trump’s federal indictment. Here is a taste: There are many reasons to believe he will be—and ought to be—a […]
Happy Father’s Day!
He has paced the living room for hours on many a night over the years, comforting a fussy baby. The babies are not babies anymore, but he is still their favorite book reader, bath giver, Monopoly player, waffle server, and […]
Southern Baptist pastor Linda Barnes Popham speaks out: “Why now?”
Everyone in the Southern Baptist world and beyond was talking this week about Rick Warren and Saddleback Church. But what about Linda Barnes Popham and Fern Creek Baptist Church? Fern Creek Baptist is in Louisville, Kentucky, the city that is […]
Juneteenth has always been “distinctly local” commemoration
Historian Tiya Miles wonders how the celebration of Juneteenth might change now that it is a federal holiday. Here is a taste of her piece today at The New York Times: It’s been two years since Juneteenth became a federal […]
Robert Gottlieb, RIP
Last weekend I watched the documentary Turn Every Page. Here is the trailer: Before I watched his documentary I knew that Robert Gottlieb was Robert Caro’s editor and he was the editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, but that […]
Cormac McCarthy inspires a consequential question: What is the worth of holy awe?
One of America’s great novelists passed away this week. Here is National Public Radio: Cormac McCarthy, one of the great novelists of American literature, died Tuesday of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. His […]
Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley suggests that Trump could die in prison
Some you may remember Jonathan Turley as the George Washington University law professor who testified at Donald Trump first impeachment hearing in 2019. At that time he asked: “Will a slipshod impeachment make us less made or will it only […]
“Later you wonder what your children will remember about these days and where the past will find them”
I like to think of Robert Erle Barham as the cultivator of Current ‘s literary soul. If you are not familiar with his creative non-fiction, you should be. In January 2023 we ran his piece “When You Measured the World.” […]
What is popular this week at Current?
Here are the most popular features of the week at Current: Here are the most popular posts of the last week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home blog: Here are the most popular posts of the last week at The Arena blog:
What I am reading: A new book on Thoreau the worker
Review: Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle. Princeton University Press, 2023. 232 pp., $27.95 For three years in the 1920s, students and faculty at the University of Mississippi who needed to […]
On Fear of Flying
The sublimity—and absurdity—of air travel
Cornel West is now seeking the nomination of the Green Party
Last week West was running as the nominee of the People’s Party. Now he is seeking the Green Party nomination, a party on the ballot in more states than the People’s Party. So far he is the only declared Green […]
Wikipedia editors speak out
I do not allow my students to use Wikipedia as a source in their research papers. But I do encourage them to go to Wikipedia to learn more about their topics. Sometimes Wikipedia footnotes can lead students to sources that […]