A reminder, for those in the Washington area: I’ll be lecturing this Monday, March 17, at Georgetown University. Called “Living with the Dead: Why Cities Need Cemeteries and Nations Need Memorials,” the talk is at 7:00 pm in the ICC auditorium.

Cosponsored by the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown and National Civic Art Society, the lecture is a specific application to civil architecture and urban design of the work I did in “Death & Politics,” the long essay on the centrality of grief to political theory that appeared this summer in First Things. The respondents will be National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia, the New Criterion’s Roger Kimball, and the architectural historian Denis McNamara. A reception will follow the lecture, I’m told, and the event is open to the public.

C-SPAN may be taping the lecture, for those who unable to attend, but come if you can.

M.Z. Hemingway, journalist/blogger extraordinaire at Get Religion, has written this handy reference tool, now available at Modern Reformation magazine.

Yes, atheism is not only old, it’s decrepit, and the only things new in the new atheism are those bar-code thingies on the dust jackets. (And that ticking sound you hear in the background is its fifteen minutes of mass-media fame winding down . . .)

With more panache than the four in hand tie and less foppery than the ascot, the bow tie stands as the golden mean of distinction in men’s neckwear. I started wearing bow ties in my freshman year of high school, and over the years I’ve encountered many people who were surprised that yes, the tie was real, and even a few who thought that I looked like Tucker Carlson.

For years, bow ties have been a rarity north of the Mason-Dixon line. But now, says David Colman in a New York Times article entitled “If You’re Young and Not Fainthearted,” the bow tie is coming back, and my generation is leading the charge. According to Randy Hanauer, the owner of bowties.com, “All the growth is coming from young people. I’d say guys from senior year in high school to about 25. It goes along with all the seersucker and madras they’ve gotten into. This generation likes to dress up and look nice, unlike the generation prior to them.”

Colman does get one thing wrong. For him, a man should not look like Southern gentry or an Ivy League professor–too “costume-ish”–but instead his attire should hint at “some romantically out-of-it, bespectacled antihero.” In other words, wear a bow tie, but wear it with the irony my generation attaches to everything. Thanks, but I’ll take the genuine jollity of seersucker or tweeds any day.

Colman also says that bow ties nail down “a key point in men’s style — that is, dandyish one-upmanship.” He’s right about that, of course, but as much as dandyism can be an important aspect of manliness (take Sir Percy Blakeney, for example), not all men are dandies. Still, the resurgence of the bow tie shows a sartorial refinement that is encouraging.

The Episcopal Church has come in for more than its share of bad press over the past few years/decades, and the Anglican Communion is quickly becoming a synonym for entropy. But there are still bastions of orthodoxy that unabashedly hoist the flag of traditional 39-Article Anglicanism as it reaches out to the unchurched and the unbelieving in the big city.

So, as a break from the usual TEC/Anglican needling, I thought it would be nice to light a candle rather than curse the darkness. To which end I give you Christ Church NYC.

Back in 2001, John Mason, then rector of a robust evangelical Anglican congregation in Sydney, was called to Manhattan to plant a church in the Anglican tradition. It so happened that he was living downtown on September 11—which triggered renewed interest in, shall we say, the permanent things. And Christ Church NYC was born.

Click on its About Us page and you will find links to the Ten Historic Elements of Anglicanism as composed by Dr. Paul Barnett, former bishop of North Sydney, Australia. These elements are guiding principles for Christ Church—and evangelical Anglicanism in general—and provide an extensive and straightforward reply to the question asked in my headline.

So if you’re in the NYC area and interested in learning about the Christian faith as read through an Anglican lens, or are already an Episcopalian/Anglican looking for a congregation that preaches the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, not the Times, the Guardian, the Voice, and the Jesus Seminar, Christ Church may be just what you’re looking for.