Sublime

The longings for wholeness, justice, and significance are three aspects of a universal longing for goodness found within the human heart. As cultural apologists, part of our task is to partner with the Holy Spirit in awakening this longing for goodness. We do this by pursuing the one who is perfectly whole, the source of justice, and the fount of m

Augustine is our contemporary. He has directly and indirectly shaped the way we understand our pursuits, the call to authenticity.

churches that can thrive in our secular age.

I adopt Hunter’s “faithfully present within” culture approach, augmented by Andy Crouch’s insight that Christians are called to be creators and cultivators of the good, true, and beautiful. Alternative accounts of cultural apologetics could be developed that explicitly endorse one or another of Niebuhr’s possible positions on Christ and culture.

The affirmation of this disenchanted world wins us many gains but in turn strips away a meaning system that made divine action as obvious and formative in people’s lives as market capitalism is today.

in an accelerated modernity inside a culture of youthfulness, to be of the past is to not be revered for your wisdom and the perspective of your experience.

a teacher sees to the heart of the matter and pulls things through to other things and then more things, connecting what others do not even see as connected—suffering to hope to structures to desire to agents to joy, and all to God in the depths, always in the depths.

presented the Durkheimian vision of society, favored by social conservatives, in which the basic social unit is the family, rather than the individual, and in which order, hierarchy, and tradition are highly valued. I contrasted this vision with the liberal Millian vision, which is more open and individualistic. I noted that a Millian society has d

In late modernity we’re not willing or able to name (beyond for our individual selves) the virtues, the values, or the character traits that make for a good life. We may have some ideas, but describing the substance seems to risk violating the ethic of authenticity. Our moral stance—our sense of what is good and what creates a good life—is authenti