Since this post first went live on the morning of 06/23, I have received additional information that is much more encouraging than what was communicated originally. Thus I am updating this post with the welcome news that efforts to re-home […]
The Arena
The Unexpected Complications of the Abortion Debate
Review: Roe: The History of a National Obsession by Mary Ziegler. Yale University Press, 2023. 248 pp., $27.00 The first time I heard Mary Ziegler present her scholarship on abortion was more than a decade ago, before she had published […]
Ideas in progress: David O’Hara on interdisciplinary humanities, sustainability, and bees
Social media can be depressing, but as Andrea Turpin reminded a while back, having a secret list of “Deeply Good People” can be a helpful way to bring to the fore the encouraging content. And some of the most encouraging […]
Dictators R Us
It’s been a good PR spring and summer for dictators, old and new. Earlier in the spring, an article in the American Conservative waxed poetically over Vlad the Impaler’s leadership lessons for the rest of us. Some conservatives, in the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Politics and education
What is the purpose of education? That’s a big question, perhaps too big for an Arena blog post, but I wish to offer a few thoughts. We live in a day of “education wars.” C.S. Lewis uses this following stanza […]
Ideas in Progress: Rick Kennedy on teaching, writing, and sailing
Today’s interview is with Rick Kennedy, Professor of History at Point Loma Nazarene University, and the author of a number of books and articles on topics as wide-ranging as the history of logic, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, education, historiography, and Christian […]
Welcome to Pottersville
Back at the dawn of this century, writer Gary Kamiya penned one of the most arresting meditations on America I know. It was hard to tell just how tongue-in-cheek “All hail Pottersville!” was. The setting of George Bailey’s nightmare vision […]
Disney people vs. Shakespeare people
Disney fans can learn from Shakespeare fans. Lately people are upset with the Walt Disney Company pretty frequently. If we limit ourselves to the complaints about films, we can observe that it’s often about movie remakes. Some people are unhappy […]
Plants and blogs
Every once and a while over the years, a well-meaning friend will gift me a plant. The beautiful living gift is usually accompanied by words of assurance: “it is so easy to take care of it” or “it’s truly unkillable” […]
Many know the night: a lesson from Elie Wiesel
Many know the night. This was the message I heard on the afternoon of September 10, 2002, while sitting in the hushed, overwarm, overcrowded chapel of Middlebury College, where I was just beginning my sophomore year of studies. My friends […]
Lucy S. R. Austen on Elisabeth Elliot
Lucy S. R. Austen’s biography of Elisabeth Elliot is scheduled for release this month. We are grateful that she visited the Arena to tell a little bit about this project, her research, writing, and “rest between two notes.” You mentioned […]
Of mushrooms, arsenic, and pea protein powder
On a trip earlier this spring, Dan overheard a curious conversation at the airport. One woman was passionately advocating for a natural lifestyle to another while awaiting the boarding process to begin. Firmly opposed to all vaccines and caffeine (“it’s […]
We can handle more complexity
One of the most recent rebrands in our media ecosystem is “HBO Max” becoming “Max.” What problem does this possibly solve? Ostensibly it will help Discovery + maintain more of its identity and not get buried in HBO programming. But […]
Ideas in Progress: Christopher Gehrz on choosing a (Christian) college
Our kids are still in middle school, so we’ve got a few years to go before we need to help them make the two of the biggest decisions they’ll make: where to go to college and what to do when […]
Why does the US have such a large national debt?
Now that the country has once again survived a trip to the brink of financial chaos in exchange for concessions related to the debt ceiling, it’s worth asking why the United States has such a large federal debt and what […]
Ideas in Progress: Julie Durbin on vocation, mission, teaching, and the creative life (Part II)
In part I of this interview, you told the fascinating story of the many hats you have worn and currently wear—missionary and traveler, writer and musician, and of course, professor. So, let’s pick up now with this last one, in […]
Ideas in Progress: Julie Durbin on vocation, mission, teaching, and the creative life (Part I)
I have gotten glimpses but would love to hear more about your vocational life so far. You are currently an academic, but you have also spent a significant part of your life on the mission field in Ukraine. What was this like? What […]