Phil Christman is the author of Midwest Futures, How to Be Normal, and, most recently, Why Christians Should Be Leftists. He teaches first-year writing at the University of Michigan, and his essays and reviews have appeared in Plough, The Christian Century, Paste, Books & Culture, and other publications.
The public university and the small-town college are the best and worst of higher education options.
The cases for travel are often sillier than the cases against, and I think it’s important to question them.
There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.
A small town might well be angry; it is asked to do everything.
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer.
Mary Midgley’s writing was profound but rarely technical; she trained her sights on general problems.
Can neoliberalism’s conceptual structure be traced directly to medieval Western Christianity?
What is this thing we’re trying to be?
Small wonder that Midwestern cities, institutions, and people show up again and again in the twentieth-century effort to determine what, in America, is normal.
Those who write about the rural, white, poor South often alternate between disgust and empathy.
The Tragedy of True Crime is both a critique of and a major contribution to true-crime literature.