Samuel James

Dec 9, 2024 | thegospelcoalition.org | Samuel James

At the beginning of this decade, the entire Western world saw an existential intermission unknown in living memory. Like the wind and waves at Jesus’s rebuke, everything ceased. The COVID-19 pandemic was, as much as anything else, a global reset. Many wondered what it’d mean. What lessons would we learn? How would life look different after such a historic loss of life, capital, and identity? In an April 2021 essay, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han gave a straightforward answer: It wouldn’t.

Oct 27, 2024 | thedispatch.com | Michael Reneau |Robert A. Sirico |Daniel Darling |Samuel James

What is the Catholic Church’s most recent synod trying to accomplish? By and Published October 27, 2024 Happy Sunday. Earlier this weekend in Rome, participants wrapped up meetings that Pope Francis earlier this year said he hoped would be “the permanent way of acting in the church”: the Synod on Synodality. But what is it, why has it taken so long, and what’s the “so what?” of it all?

Oct 20, 2024 | thedispatch.com | Michael Reneau |Daniel Darling |Samuel James |David Wolpe

Some say believers should sit out this election, and politics altogether, but doing so is worse for the country. By and Published October 20, 2024 Hi and happy Sunday. The intersection of religious faith and politics is always contentious, but it seems more pronounced in an election in which both major party candidates are so unpopular.

Apr 16, 2024 | digitalliturgies.net | Samuel James

In the 2000s, Christian contemporary music (CCM) underwent a profound transition that defines it to this day. Nearly two decades of being a vibrant musical counterculture culminated in a 1990s that produced an astonishing amount of commercial success. A good amount of that success was in the pop/rock genre, and by Y2K the CCM scene was producing a ton of genuinely good bands that earned attention from MTV, Billboard, and other outlets. In the 2000s, however, something changed.

Mar 19, 2024 | digitalliturgies.net | Samuel James

Depending on whom you ask, Catherine Middleton—the Princess of Wales and wife of the next King of England—is currently either fine, dead, in a coma, on the run, divorced, recovering from an abortion (to conceal an adulterous conception), or perhaps never existed at all. All of these theories have made for depressing yet oddly addictive social media noise over the past few weeks. The princess’s absence from public life was planned, and scheduled to be from Christmas until Easter.