Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

In the latest video blog from For the Life of the World, Evan Koons reads a beautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins over some striking visual imagery. Watch it below: Hopkins begins by highlighting the wondrous and mysterious pulse of nature, moving eventually to the acts of we “mortal things,” prone to appease the self, and bent on crying, “Whát I dó is me: for that I came.” Continue Reading...

The Root of All Freedoms: Kuyper on Freedom of Conscience

The Obama administration’s HHS mandate has led to significant backlash among religious groups, each claiming that certain provisions violate their religious beliefs and freedom of conscience. Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling was a victory for such groups, but other disputes are well underway, with many more to come. Continue Reading...

From Steadfast Conservatives to the Faith and Family Left: Highlights from Pew Research’s Political Typology Survey

In discussions of political issues, the American public is too often described in a binary format: Left/Right, Republican/Democrat, Red State/Blue State. But a new survey by the Pew Research Center takes a more granular look at our current political typology by sorting voters into cohesive groups based on their attitudes and values: Partisan polarization – the vast and growing gap between Republicans and Democrats – is a defining feature of politics today. Continue Reading...

The School of Love: How the Family Teaches Flourishing

In the first episode of For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles, Evan Koons discovers a new approach to Christian cultural engagement. Revolving around “God’s economy of all things,” he proceeds to explore six key areas of human engagement, one in each episode, including the economies of love, creative service, order, wisdom, and wonder, and, finally, through the church herself — an organism and institution that runs before and beyond all else. Continue Reading...

Family-First Conservatism

Neo-, paleo-, theo-, crunchy, compassionate, fiscal, social. . . in modern America there are almost as many brands of conservatism as there are conservatives. To truly understand what a conservative believes, though, it is often more instructive to simply ask what it is they want to conserve. Continue Reading...

Ross Douthat On Family And Culture

New York Times columnist and Acton University 2014 plenary speaker Ross Douthat is featured in an interview with the Institute for Family Studies. Douthat addresses issues surrounding marriage and family life, pop culture influences and the media. Continue Reading...

All Is Gift: How Our Work Sings of God’s Presence

“All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God…God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation.” Continue Reading...