When I was in graduate school, using the word “agency” was a favorite signal of one’s in-group status. In the cutthroat world of graduate history seminars, “agency” is a way to criticize “tropes” about people in the past. A commonly called-out “trope” is that “subalterns,” or... Read More →

  When he was in high school, my eldest son was assigned Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He was to compare it with a sermon of his own choosing—one his deeply Calvinist teacher might expect him to find wanting in light of the... Read More →