Welcome to Theolite

I am an evangelical Christian pursuing an MA in English. As a kid I grew up on The Sugar Creek Gang; now I study Freud and Derrida.

There can often seem to be a disjunction between the community of my faith and the community of my discipline. This is helpful, I think. One of my greatest personal fears is being inside a Christian bubble, a self-regarding pool of churchiness that fails to critically examine itself and the world around it. I’ve chosen my career path in part to ensure that I won’t get stuck in Christianese. Yet a reactionary policy like this can often err on the opposite extreme, rejecting key tenets of the faith in the name of contemporaneity. If Christianity is true, in all the glory of historic orthodoxy, then it deserves to be energetically and uncompromisingly pursued.

Theolite is my attempt to keep the balance.

On Theolite, I’ll be posting thoughts about things I’ve read or seen and how they interact with a Christian view of the world. We are told in Ephesians 5:9 to “try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord”; these articles will be my scribbles toward discernment. What is good and right and true in the things I read? What is beautiful? What is not? And what can we learn from the bad, the wrong, and the false that can spur us toward godliness and reinforce our faith?

I hope in all of this that we — myself and anyone reading — will be spurred to love the Lord our God with all our mind: to think critically about both the sacred and the secular so that we may better understand our world and the God who is still creating it.