Christian Ethics in the Wild: A Midsummer Appeal

Why Does This Exist?

The summer is in full gear now: the kids are home all the time, and our weeks are a combination of play, learning, and doing the things that the last two years have made impossible. And in the midst of this, I’m doing what professors do during the summer: a combination of play, learning, and writing the things that the last two years have made it impossible not to write.

I began this newsletter last year as a way to contribute to the rebuilding of the Christian mind by writing about the moral life in a way which consciously avoids the culture war frame. Culture wars are always proxy wars for other things, which means that the moral life becomes an emaciated stand-in for whatever fight you really want to have. And so, the moral life is forced to be a long series of positions that are held, but not lived, laws affirmed but not understood. We all become dumber.

Since starting, it’s been a great way for me to work out some questions that have been bugging me, and from the responses I get, have been bugging many of you as well: questions of the role of institutions, of Scripture, of the Christian moral life in a pluralist world. Some concerns always surface, and I try to stretch out beyond those concerns, but as they say about preachers, you only have about ten sermons that you say. But I keep writing for this reason: I think it’s important to do. Over my career, I’ve felt a gentle pull toward ethics, a pull that I can trace back now to the beginning of my doctoral work, though I didn’t know enough then to name it as such. And now, nearly 17 years later from that point, it’s skin that I’m learning to love.

Below, I’m linking a few of my favorite pieces from the past year, and asking that, if you choose, to share some of them with those who you think might also want a companion for the moral life. Attention is in short supply, and there’s more than enough good things and dumb things appealing for our minds. But I write this every week out of the conviction that good things are worth doing, if only because I benefit in doing them.

The Institutions Cannot Love You, the first in a series on the moral life of institutions.

You Really Should (Mostly) Get Rid of Online Church, an intervention into the streaming debates, and why it’s better to do the hard work of including people physically.

When Dorothy Day Had An Abortion, the piece that eventually was expanded into this piece over at Comment, on why abortion is best understood as a culture care and not legal question.

And this one, which was initially for paid subscribers only, which I’m pulling out from behind the paywall: Just You, Me, and our Digital Mediators.

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In all things, it’s important to take time with the moral life. There are no shortcuts, and perhaps the worst thing about the culture war variety of ethics is that gives us the illusion that ethics is a matter of having the right thoughts. But discipleship is long, and full of false steps, even when we begin from the right place. So, let’s keep going.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.