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Picture of Joshua Pauling

Joshua Pauling

Joshua Pauling is vicar at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Charlotte, NC. He is author of the book Education’s End: Its Undoing Explained, Its Hope Reclaimed and co-author with Robin Phillips of the book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine. He is contributing editor at Salvo, columnist at Modern Reformation, and has written for a variety of other publications including CiRCE, Forma Journal, Front Porch Republic, Logia, The Lutheran Witness, Mere Orthodoxy, Merion West, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, and Touchstone. He is a frequent guest on Issues Etc. Radio Show/Podcast. Josh also taught high school history for thirteen years and now spends a portion of his time as a classical educator and running his own business making custom furniture. He studied at Messiah College, Reformed  Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University, and is continuing his studies at Concordia Theological Seminary. He and his wife Kristi have two children.

anxious kid

Taking The Anxious Generation Further

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Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.
Presbyterian church

The Protestant Prophet: J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism at 100

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In a time when the political, religious, and cultural challenges strikingly parallel those of Machen’s day, his arguments and actions offer us a set of timeless and timely insights. We would all do well to observe them.
Little girl portrait monochrome

Realists Unite! New Documentary on Gender-Affirming Care Presents “Pro-Reality” Position in Response to Trans Ideology

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We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm.
woman absorbed by her cell phone

Modern Man Is Psychologized, Sexualized, Politicized—and Digitized

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While the digitized promises of meta-man may entice us, they are ultimately false promises based on a rejection of fundamental aspects of human embodiment. There is an integrated wholeness to man that requires both resting in the givenness of human identity and actively engaging with the world.

Collegiate Advice: Treasure the Ordinary

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As young people prepare for college and early adulthood, they should reject conventional narratives that celebrate self-fulfillment and careerism. Instead, they should foster commitment to people, places, and ideas, and prepare for hardship and sacrifice. These countercultural habits and practices are difficult to establish, but they will serve one well in all stages of life.
roosevelt, horse, building

The Speech of the Century: Remembering Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”

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The recent anniversary of Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech provides an opportunity to reflect on the enduring relevance of his insights into the role of virtue and action in education, the importance of family life that is ordered towards the creation and formation of the next generation, and the need to build political community based on truth and integrity.
Painting of Baptism of Christ

Baptism and the Crisis of Modern Selfhood

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Among the ruins of family and faith, amid gender deconstruction, surrounded by endless intersectional identities, and with countless constructed categories being hastily erected in their place, where can a sure and stable identity be found?
Empty Church

After Zoom Church: Restoring the Real in Christian Worship

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Church is not just a place to sing, listen, think, or emote. It is where God delivers Christ and his forgiveness through Word and Sacrament into the whole human person. Privatized, digital worship services subtly spurn physicality and community, unintentionally endorsing a mind–body dualism that runs counter to Christianity’s holistic view of the human person.
Male and female

What Are Bodies For? Beyond Bathrooms and Women’s Sports

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When gendered embodiment is treasured, maleness and femaleness are understood not as acts we perform, but as our very bodily essence. Being a man or a woman is not simply what one does, it is who one is.
Apotheosis_of_Washington_-_Close_up_of_George_Washington

Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton: Against Right-Wing Gnosticism

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Eric Voegelin’s warnings about the dangers of gnostic politics apply to the right as well as the left. Christians must make a clear and unequivocal distinction between the historic Christian faith and the misleading political religion that is more pervasive on the right than anyone seemed to realize.
St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow

The Beauty of Self-Giving Love in Anna Karenina

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If we combine the beauty of art and the power of narrative with rational argument, we can convince people of the worthiness of marriage and family life more effectively than by argument alone. Anna Karenina is an example of how to do this. It beckons the reader to choose the better path, contrasting the destructive adultery of Vronsky and Anna with Levin and Kitty’s enchanting journey into the life of married love.
Man in Front of Truck

The Paradox of Autonomous Vehicles: Liberated Cars, Passive People

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While autonomous vehicles sound freeing at first, they also have the potential to increase passivity and decrease human agency.
Homeschool

Pandemic Lessons: Homecoming, Homeschooling, and the Home Economy

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A powerful antidote to such atomistic existence, loneliness, and alienation, is found in the family: productive, resilient, and together. A family-centered life with the home as the engine of education and economics orders one’s vocations and roles in ways that build lasting familial bonds and provide stability amid a changing world. COVID-19 quarantining provides an opportunity for this reality to sink in.
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