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I’m very pleased to unveil a project several years in the making.

Letter & Liturgy is an online writing initative and an evangelical Christian review of ideas and culture. Throughout nearly 5 years of regular blogging, I’ve had a vision for a site that did for gospel-centered...

A few months before I started there, I took part in a preview weekend for the Bible college that I eventually attended. At one point I had the opportunity to ask the then-dean of the college what the vision of the school was for people (like me) who did not intend to go into vocational ministry....

Although she (Augustine’s mother) had warned me to guard my virginity, she did not seriously pay heed to what her husband had told her about me, and which she felt to hold danger for the future: for she did not seek to restrain my sexual drive within the limit of the marriage bond, if it...

On Friday I stuck up for the movie industry. Last night the Academy Awards made me regret it. I’ve defended both films and the Oscars from their conservative naysayers in the past (and for the record, I still think the Right tends to be obnoxious about pop culture), but the telecast last...

I agree with almost everything Carl Trueman has to say in this piece, which makes me all the more eager to briefly interject and explain why I think he’s wrong to make the movie industry his whipping boy.

Trueman’s contempt for Hollywood celebrity culture is understandable and...

Yesterday I shook John Piper’s hand for the first time. It was a big moment for me. There are many things I could say here about what Piper’s books and sermons and articles have meant for me over the past 10 years or so, but I’ll try to summarize it like this:

At 21 years old and a...

Philosophy may expand our ideas of creation, but it neither inspires a love to the moral character of the Creator, nor a well-grounded hope of eternal life. Philosophy at most can only place us upon the top of Pisgah—there, like Moses, we must die. It gives us no possession of the good land:...

Social media doesn’t usually shock me, but it got me this week. I was genuinely taken aback by the bile and viciousness I saw toward Billy Graham and his family from progressives, especially LGBT progressives. What I saw in dozens of tweets from accounts with shiny blue checkmarks was hatred...

Billy Graham passed this morning. I recommend Christianity Today’s special coverage of their founder. There is arguably no more important evangelical in American history than Billy Graham. And yet, as my friend Justin Taylor remarked this morning, Graham’s righteousness is the exact...

For the past decade, J.K. Rowling’s relationship to her own work has been incredibly cynical and stunningly mercenary. As a serious fan of the Harry Potter books, I’m thankful for her obvious talents and the richness and beauty of the mythology she’s made. Her mammoth wealth and...

Thinking about gun control issues, one thing that’s occurred to me is how I wish conservatives had the same kind of relationship with the Second Amendment as they do with the First.

Here’s what I mean. When it comes to pornography, card-carrying conservatives have found a free speech...

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Schmaltzy, Hallmark sentimentality has its problems

But ironic detachment will kill you.

David Frum stays about the Trump administration’s habit of . We know this, because he tweets and writes about it. Frum’s joking around, here. Presidents and their partisans shouldn’t , and when they do lie, as Frum frequently , the public...

The problem with 's piece has nothing to do with whether porn should be legal and everything to do with the right's inability to accept women as able to self determine anything about their own sexuality.

— Brian Koppelman (@briankoppelman)

"I'm a libertarian,...

If you still don’t think adultery can utterly destroy a man’s life work, you would do well to contemplate the recent resignation and confession of Larry Taunton. I’ve never met him, but I greatly admired his 2016 book The Faith of Christopher Hitchens. Since that book was...

This is a hard read. It’s harder not just because of the tragedy of a husband and father’s brain disease, but because this story, and many others like it, will be in the back of my mind as I watch the Super Bowl. I love football, and, as my 16 month old son begs to watch highlights and...

The Amazon Top 20 nonfiction lists includes two bestsellers, both from HarperOne, that include the f-word in their title and on their covers. A single asterisk keeps both titles from their honest spellings. My memory will not win any awards, but I simply do not recall ever seeing a trade book in...

I think it’s past time to admit that the hostility we see from college students toward speech and ideas they dislike is a generational issue. I know this sounds like I’m encouraging stereotypes of millennials, and reasonable people are not supposed to talk about any group in that kind...

Rod Dreher, a writer for whom I have a lot of admiration and respect, nevertheless has a tendency to overstate things, especially when those things pertain to his lived experience. Likewise, he has an unfortunate tendency to assume the worst intentions of people who push back against the...

I have a piece up at First Things today on the sexual revolution, #MeToo, and why women are always the biggest losers in a sexually autonomous society. Here’s an excerpt:

The two most consequential gains of the sexual revolution in my lifetime have been birth control and pornography, both of...

-Sneering dismissal of an author is acceptable to the degree that his book likewise is sneering and dismissive. What works marvelously well in a review of Richard Dawkins doesn’t in a review of Mitch Albom. You might have the same opinion of both writers, and that’s fine! But responding...

Netflix has recently added both The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II to its streaming library. Below is something I wrote in 2014 on what makes Part II so great.

“That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Michael Corleone is not lying when he says these words in The...

I have only a brief thought on Matt Loftus’s recent essay (and follow-up blog post) on whether we should use the term “pro-life” to refer to issues other than the traditional referents.

It seems to me that you can’t make the term “pro-life” do more by making it mea...

When I was in Bible college, few things received scorn as unanimously and frequently as the self-help genre. The corner of your local bookstore dominated by big, bright covers and names like Oprah and Tony Robbins was, almost all of us young, restless, Reformed pre-seminarians agreed, poison. We...