I wrote in my anarchist notebook: Jacques Ellul thinks that Christians should be anarchists because God, in Jesus Christ, has renounced Lordship. I think something almost the opposite: it is because Jesus is Lord (and every knee shall ultimately bow before him, and every tongue confess his Lordship) that Christians should be anarchists. I hadn’t remembered writing that, but came across the post this morning, just after posting on Phil Christman’s book. Do I think that Christians should ...| The Homebound Symphony
Phil Christman has said that Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and I form a kind of writerly school — though he has yet to define its parameters. I kinda hope he does that one day. UPDATE: Phil has written firmly to me: Now, listen here — I did not call you and Adam and Francis a “school!” I called you a Poundian/Wyndham Lewisian vortex and said that you don’t quite constitute an ism! If you were a school, I’d be trying to matriculate! Disagreements about politics are one thin...| The Homebound Symphony
When my daughter was finishing her freshman year of high school in Canada, all at once and without warning, she became the target of school bullying because she was a Christian, or, as the other kids teased, “a Chrees-jan”. A “Chrees-jan” group chat was created by other high school kids, whose sole purpose was to mock my daughter and her faith. Some kids threatened to beat her up. Others, those she thought were her friends, quietly abandoned her. It got so bad that the public school...| UnHerd
The starting point for my friend Tim Larsen’s new book The Fires of Moloch is another book, one published in 1917 and often reprinted over the next few years. The Church in the Furnace is a collection of essays by Anglican clergymen who served in the Great War as military chaplains. The chaplains were sometimes thought to be of a modernizing or liberalizing tendency because they were so straightforward about the horrors of the war — and what they believed to be the church’s unpreparedn...| The Homebound Symphony
Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction...| Liberties
