Articles & Essays

I had eighty-two absences my senior year of high school—true story. Not that I stayed home and committed misdemeanors. Rather, I read books by myself in my parents’ quiet living room. I studied European history and researched the nearest school proctoring an Advanced Placement exam…

The titles lining the shelves labeled “fiction” in your typical evangelical bookstore will not be sold in a hundred years. Those novels will never be taught in a college classroom as literature, and they will never transform anyone’s heart, mind, or soul. Rather, those books…

“If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones,” C. S. Lewis writes. We may need to update Lewis’s claim for the twenty-first-century reader, for those who do not read good books will not necessarily read bad ones, but may—in not knowing why or…

“Whoever has ears let him hear,” Jesus says. But what if God is speaking a language that’s imperceptible to us, and what if we have made ourselves deaf to his voice? It’s frightening to imagine that we’d be unable to understand God speaking to us.…

Demonic lies hide as truth. They also lurk close to home. I stood before the dazed librarian as she scanned each questionable title: The Death of Satan, I See Satan Fall Like Lighting, By Authors Possessed, the books about demons piling up before her. I remember my…

When you read old books, you’re blessed with a vision from outside your own time and place. Most of us cannot see the assumptions, stemming from our particularities, that blind us and distort how we view reality. When C. S. Lewis wrote an introduction to an old…

When I question students at my Christian college about how their faith affects their learning practices, they stare blankly at me or scribble a note about being motivated by the true, good, and beautiful. But studying (and education) for Christians should look different than a…

Reading fiction is useless. So is poetry. All imaginative works of beauty are useless, and praise God for that. Stories and poems are meant to be enjoyed in and of themselves, and while they have transformative effects on their readers, heaven forbid they be used as such.…

“Why read Russian literature?” It was the kind of question that a professor longs for, and the student asked it with genuine interest. In an age when we scan articles in minutes and read more tweets than books, the question is fair. Russian novels are…

In 2012, a writer for The Atlantic brought to readers’ attention the decline of virtues in our vocabulary. Over the last hundred years, people were writing less and less about sincerity, patience, or mercy. Researchers noticed a sharp decline in “virtue words”: “People simply do not think/talk/write about…