Chip Prehn

“A Merry Heart Goes All the Day”: Why I’m Reading Walter Scott

February 10, 2020

Books, Commentary, Contributors, Reviews & Culture, The Episcopal Church

Scott invests many of his characters with moral goodness and, occasionally, holiness. His heroes and heroines are inspiring. The sheer degradedness and badness of his anti-heroes leaves the strongest impression. The novels are above all about character.

A Good Shepherd

Chip Prehn

October 23, 2019

Commentary, Contributors, Ministry, The Episcopal Church

This good and true shepherd’s interest in and care for all of us who became his “sons” was surely a sign to us that the Good Shepherd had plans for us and was counting on us to be His disciples.

What’s Going On With David Brooks?

Chip Prehn

August 21, 2019

Books, Commentary, Reviews & Culture, The Episcopal Church

Second Mountain shows that Brooks’s odyssey in faith will be complicated. But why shouldn’t a sincere conversion in twenty-first-century America be complicated or unconventional?

How to Be Perfect

Chip Prehn

May 21, 2019

Ethics, The Episcopal Church

The command to be perfect is only a deeper statement of the startling ethics Jesus presents in the beginning of the chapter in the beatitudes.

Wendell Berry, Poet and Prophet

Chip Prehn

March 27, 2019

Commentary, Ethics, The Episcopal Church

Wendell Berry, this great Bard — as great an American voice as Thoreau’s or Whitman’s — assumes that the reality before and all around us in nature is infinitely complex and therefore cannot be fully comprehended by any human intellect.