A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the pumpkinification of autumn—this annual season, peculiar to the United States, that lasts precisely from midnight on September 1st to approximately sunset on Thanksgiving Day, and that requires pumpkin (or, at least,...
This is one crisis that must not go to waste
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. I would like to tell here the tale of two colleges or universities—really, the tale of two types of college right now, but we are going to go...
Recently, my eight-year-old son has become mildly obsessed with the nineteenth-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Inspiring my son to write his own illustrated last will and testament, upon his death Bentham bequeathed his body to science, requesting that following a...
Many unicorns in one civilized place form a blessing for your Saturday. Here is this week’s herd, corralled all together: *** Louise Perry’s latest for First Things, “We Are Repaganizing,” is the most important thing I read this week. A...
Hannah Szenes helps us hear the sounds of a still, small voice
One unicorn may just be a figment of your imagination: did you even see it? But many unicorns put together form a blessing. *** Let’s start with a news story that my children, who have been digging up the backyard...
‘Tis the season of pumpkin spice and everything nice. At midnight on September 1st, it happened again, just as it does every year in recent memory: the pumpkinification of autumn. The term is one, I should note, that existed already...
Many geese form a gaggle, many rabbits form a fluffle, and a group of unicorns forms a blessing. As we gear up for the long weekend, here are this week’s unusual unicorn-worthy reads, coming to you on a Friday instead...
If you have spent any time in evangelical circles, Russell Moore requires no introduction. A former professor and dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he was for eight years the President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious...
This roundup concept was dubbed a unicorn at first, because it seemed to be a mythical beast, to be seen in the wild just once and never again. But here’s roundup #4, so perhaps it’s here to stay, at least...
When colleges dismantle the humanities, everyone suffers. The past several years have seen the dismantling of the humanities and the liberal arts in many a university and college in the U.S., including my now former employer, a regional comprehensive state...
Tim Larsen offered an important bit of unicorn-related trivia in a comment last week: a group of unicorns is called a blessing. This is the third unicorn roundup of eclectic reads from this week. But is it a blessing? ***...
Is it still a unicorn if seen twice? No matter. Here is an utterly subjective list of some quirky and interesting reads this week. *** We begin in the land of all things pink, as Current ran its two-day forum...
There’s a challenge out there: you wear the same dress for one hundred days straight. The idea is to inspire creativity: look what you can do to make the same dress look different day after day (bonus: some who have...
It’s a never-before-seen mythical beast: an eclectic links roundup of the week here at the Arena. This makes it a unicorn. Will I ever get organized enough on another Friday night to do this again? Unclear. But for this week...
The revelatory power of hoards—both ancient and modern
A year ago, a welcome second edition appeared of that most articulate of jeremiads (as it has been frequently dubbed) about the state of the evangelical mind and (related) evangelical scholarship: Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The...
Years ago, a former colleague of mine and Dan’s at the University of West Georgia said something nice about President Warren Harding in a lecture that inspired students and colleagues to troll him for years thereafter. A President Harding bobblehead...
Ancient military historian Bret Devereaux has a piece on modern fascination with Sparta in Foreign Policy that is very well worth reading. Ancient historians have argued for a while, indeed, that idealizing Sparta is bad history, but in this essay,...
