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Religious Music & Entertainment

2020-10-05T08:09:06-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Whose Cynicism? Whose Theory? How (Not) to Critique Postmodernity

Last updated on: October 5, 2020 at 8:09 am By John Ehrett

Almost everyone in modern America is now familiar with phrases like “white privilege,” “oppression,” “appropriation” and so on—and almost everyone is also keenly aware that these terms simply weren’t part of the mainstream social discourse up until a few years ago. What changed? Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s new book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody is a sustained attempt to “name the elephant”—to accessibly systematize the contemporary currents of social-justice... Read more

Culture

2020-09-22T15:00:35-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Can Startups Design Religions?

Last updated on: September 22, 2020 at 3:00 pm By John Ehrett

It’s been a number of months since I finished Eugene McCarraher’s behemoth book The Enchantments of Mammon, but I continue to find myself compelled by its tantalizing, subversive thesis. McCarraher argues, at great length, that modern finance capitalism is not, as it purports to be, merely a neutral scientific approach to reality; rather, it is its own ontology, one that sneaks in metaphysical commitments in its talk of value and quantification and commodities. What’s more, McCarraher submits, this picture of the world... Read more

Culture

2020-09-14T07:54:15-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

What I Wish Aimee Byrd’s “Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” Had Argued

Last updated on: September 14, 2020 at 7:54 am By John Ehrett

A few months ago, Reformed writer Aimee Byrd kicked up a minor firestorm in the confessional Presbyterian corner of the internet with her most recent book—the provocatively titled Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. In context, it’s hard to imagine a clearer shot across the bow. No discussion of evangelical theology of gender can ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and its foundational text Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. New Calvinist leading... Read more

Culture

2020-09-11T15:23:29-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“The Burnt Orange Heresy” Is a Haunting Art-World Fable

Last updated on: September 11, 2020 at 3:23 pm By John Ehrett

Abstract art, since its inception, has probably always been something of an acquired taste. For one thing, few such works truly speak for themselves—in propositional terms, that is—apart from some moniker, explanation, or contextualization. For another, it’s not obvious how exactly one is to assess the relative quality of a given piece: whereas representational art can be evaluated in terms of its verisimilitude, abstract works stand outside such a framework altogether. These questions have provoked a number of reactions over... Read more

Movies

2020-09-06T19:30:19-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“Politics After Christendom” Is Not the Political Theology You’re Looking For

Last updated on: September 6, 2020 at 7:30 pm By John Ehrett

I very much wanted to like David VanDrunen’s new book Politics After Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World. In the wake of the recent flurry of Catholic scholarship arguing both for and against classical liberalism, I’ve often thought that’s high time for Protestants to enter the lists—and perhaps offer something more interesting than either lukewarm defenses of the neoliberal status quo or historically questionable apologetics for medieval Europe. VanDrunen—who writes from the classically Reformed tradition—is certainly no intellectual slouch,... Read more

Political Theory

2020-08-08T20:46:49-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

What Freddie de Boer’s “The Cult of Smart” Misses About Education

Last updated on: August 8, 2020 at 8:46 pm By John Ehrett

For a large and growing swath of Americans, “meritocracy” is now a dirty word. To be sure, sociologists have spent decades studying the ways in which much economic and social success is traceable back to a dense web of advantages, inequalities, and unearned privileges. But until recently, the deconstruction of the ideal of the “self-made man” had not previously attracted much mainstream support. Everyone, after all, likes to believe that they’re the exception to the rule. Over the last few... Read more

Education

2020-08-03T19:51:28-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

On Good and Evil in Video Games (Or, Notes on a More Ethical Lara Croft)

Last updated on: August 3, 2020 at 7:51 pm By John Ehrett

Earlier this week, I came across an unusually compelling article on the video game commentary website Polygon. In “Games Need to Return to Black-and-White Morality,” Khee Hoon Chan levels a sharp critique of the tendency of contemporary video games—but, more broadly, pop culture as a whole—to place moral ambiguity at the center of their narratives, thereby blurring the distinction between hero and villain. (There’s a reason so many pop-culture antagonists remind their opponents, when in the throes of final confrontation,... Read more

Culture

2020-07-21T17:13:27-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Enchantments and Disenchantment

Last updated on: July 21, 2020 at 5:13 pm By John Ehrett

I have been consistently reading Terry Brooks’s Shannara Chronicles for the last eighteen years of my life—longer than any other fantasy epic I’ve ever followed. (The chronologically first book in the series, First King of Shannara, was the very first “grown-up” fantasy novel I ever read.) This year, that series draws to a close with the publication of The Last Druid, the chronologically final entry in this sprawling saga. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit these books have a... Read more

Imagination

2020-07-04T19:42:03-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“BioShock Infinite” and the Possibility of Hope

Last updated on: July 4, 2020 at 7:42 pm By John Ehrett

This Independence Day weekend, I dusted off what’s perhaps my favorite video game of all time—2013’s BioShock Infinite—and gave it a spin for the first time in six years. Graphics aside, the game really doesn’t feel like it’s aged very much. In fact, it feels perhaps more timely now than it did upon release. BioShock Infinite follows private investigator Booker DeWitt on his journey to the floating city of Columbia, a breakaway American state in thrall to a particularly toxic form... Read more

Culture

2020-06-30T07:53:48-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Homer and the Human Experience

Last updated on: June 30, 2020 at 7:53 am By John Ehrett

Several months ago, I came across what struck me as a particularly egregious proposal for university curricular revision—specifically, a push by Oxford University classics lecturers to remove Homer and Virgil from the first stage of the classics degree program. Proposals like Oxford’s were subsequently defended by Brandeis University classics scholar Joel Christensen, who penned an extended defense of relegating Homer to the “optional” category. I’ve thought a lot about Christensen’s article in the months since I first read it, not... Read more

Education

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