Author Archives: Joshua Gibbs

This playlist is fifteen hours long and I’ve been putting it on shuffle and letting it run all day, all week.

It has been the better part of a decade since I was sufficiently dialed into new stuff that I could make convincing lists of the best movies of the year, the best television shows, and so forth. Instead, here’s a list of what made my year good, some of it new, some of it old.Continue reading “Best of 2024: What Made My Year”

“With the terrible place we’re at historically and with climate change and all that, I don’t know, do you really think it’s ethical to bring another cat into the world?”

“Say It Right” is the latest episode of “In the Trenches,” and this time we’re talking about classical Christian cliches: what they are, where they come from, how they take over, why they make us weak, and what to do about it. It’s inevitable that a strong movement or institution will create cliches. In thisContinue reading “Classical Christian Cliches”

Given the way the terms are presently used, Eastern Orthodoxy is more “low church” than “high church.” If you walked into a 90 member Baptist church in Podunk, Kentucky on a Sunday morning and told a long-time member named Tina, “So, your liturgy is pretty low church, huh?” she wouldn’t have a clue what youContinue reading “Eastern Orthodoxy Isn’t High Church”

While I think Steve Coogan is the cleverest man alive, I think Chilly Gonzales is a close second.

“The progressive Christian’s error lies in believing that Christianity’s perennial polemic against the rich is an implicit defense of socialist programs. What concerns the Christ of the Gospels is not the economic situation of the poor man, but the moral condition of the rich man.” ― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Student: What exactly is a strong reading of a book?  Teacher: A clearly articulated understanding of the spirit of a book. It’s a reader’s ability to delve below appearances and describe how all the disparate elements of a book coalesce into a singular moral vision. A strong reading is an interpretation of all the characters,Continue reading “That Disorienting Feeling You Get From A Good Education”

I’ve lately seen that a conversation has already quietly begun about dropping the word “classical” from the term “classical education.”