[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. So, if you like what you read, please consider a paid subscription. And yes, I do speaking engagements.] This past May, country star Jason Aldean released a new song called “Try That in a Small Town,” which has lyrics that are—there’s really no nice way to say this—corny as hell. I’ve been listening to country music all my life, and I gotta say that Mr.

In my previous articles (here and here), I have argued that a view that regards the human soul as a substantial entity is philosophically superior to both materialism and property dualism[1], and that such a view must take into account the soul’s intimate relationship to the body to do justice to the biblical account of human beings. In this article, I address the question whether the Bible teaches that souls can exist disembodied, for which the substantial view of the soul is a precondition.

This morning over coffee, I reflected on my last post about President Biden’s strange habit of gobbling frightened children, and I found myself wondering about the etymology of the world GHOUL. Turns out the word derives from the pre-Islamic Arabic world غول, ghūl)— a desert-dwelling humanoid demon that robs graves and devours the dead. The following graph plots its usage over time: Note the initial rise in the 1880s, when the British were fascinated by Arab culture and ghost stories.

It might seem whimsical to say that the future is not what it used to be, but it’s true. Uncertainty about our personal futures is the perennial human condition, but social futures can no longer be premised on the intergenerational transmission of culture. Today, private interests drive technological change in ways that militate against the formation of collective wisdom in the public realm, while developments in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology heighten catastrophic risks.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThree descriptions of poetry Poetry is: saying what I should have said The witty comeback that escaped me then; Or else the cliché that your sadness needed Which I, too ironic, would not deliver; or What I could not wheeze out between asthmatic breaths— Poetry is saying what I should have said. Poetry is saying what I said indeed, Which went, as persona non grata, unheeded, Which now, in hushed literary revenge, I resay on the page—I declaim for the ages.