First Things RSS Feed - Matthew Milliner https://www.firstthings.com/author/matthew-milliner Matthew Milliner (http://millinerd.com @millinerd) is assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College. en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:54:37 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/matthew-milliner 60 Evangelicals and Zen Masters https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/04/evangelicals-and-zen-masters https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/04/evangelicals-and-zen-masters Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400 One evening in 1995, at an evangelical Bible study in New Jersey for twenty-­somethings, I learned that an acquaintance of mine had just dropped out of medical school and was planning to drive to a Hare Krishna ashram in Northern California. We were both tired of the kind of evangelical Christianity that had spawned the group that brought us together, the group that taught us about Christ’s love and his impending return, the group that cared for us both deeply. She was leaving the next morning. I decided to go along.

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]]> Evangelicals in Exile https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/02/evangelicals-in-exile https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/02/evangelicals-in-exile Mon, 06 Feb 2017 06:00:00 -0500 When I was an evangelical convert in high school in the 1990s, the Religious Right was rallying—not that it mattered to us. To be a Christian, I and my friends were learning, was to become an exile. The first book we studied seriously, on the tattered couches of our youth pastor’s parsonage, was the Book of Daniel. A Jewish exile in Babylon, Daniel taught us how to live apart from the blood sport of high school popularity contests. The ethos was well illustrated by the cover of the Keith Green album we listened to, titled No Compromise .

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]]> The Virgin and The Donald https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/07/the-virgin-and-the-donald https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/07/the-virgin-and-the-donald Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400 In light of reports of Donald Trump’s recent conversion to Christianity, we have reason to hope that he will visit his home parish, Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, more frequently. (For Marble Collegiate's history, see the instructive remarks of Matthew Schmitz.) As Trump pays his respects at the imposing exterior statue of Norman Vincent Peale, perhaps he will notice a nearby statue that predates it. Just a few yards from Peale are the suffering Mary, Jesus, and Joseph en route to Egypt—the Holy Family as refugees. This statue constitutes one of the most unexpected, and welcome, placements in Manhattan—almost as if Joel Osteen’s I Declare: 31 Promises to Speak Over Your Life contained an appendix on what it means to “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24). Consider the statue a visual corollary to Adlai Stevenson’s famous quip, “I find Apostle Paul appealing, and Apostle Peale appalling.”

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]]> The Other Assisi https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/06/the-other-assisi https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/06/the-other-assisi Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:50:00 -0400 We pilgrims pile into the Basilica of Saint Clare to see the San Damiano cross that spoke to Francis the words, “Rebuild my church.” A Franciscan brother approaches the microphone. I prepare myself for an exhortation. The journey here with two small children was not an easy one, and I anticipate an admonition to increase of charity, or a challenge to deny myself further material acquisition. I could use both. The friar’s message, amplified by modern acoustic technology, bounces off the Romanesque wall: “No foto.”

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]]> Where the Icons Aren't Yet Dry https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/05/where-the-icons-arent-yet-dry https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/05/where-the-icons-arent-yet-dry Tue, 24 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400 This monk is not letting us go without a sermon, but he’s earned it. We—a group of scholars brought together for a conference in Romania celebrating the legacy of the historian Peter Brown—have been treated well. We are standing in the Neamț monastery library, where the Philokalia , that indispensable compendium of Orthodox thought, was first translated into Slavonic, and we’ve been permitted to hold the original translator notes. We’ve seen towering church interiors where every visible surface beams back shimmering saints. We’ve stood before a fourteenth-century icon of the Virgin Mary (miracle-working, this one), a gift from Constantinople, whose warming presence invited me to stay. We’ve stood in front of a saint’s tomb that bulged the earth above it during the communist years. Inexplicable, then or now. The scholar who told us the story, an accomplished academic fluent in eight languages, does not seem one to make up tales.

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]]> On the Ground in Wheaton https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/03/on-the-ground-in-wheaton https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/03/on-the-ground-in-wheaton Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500 The following remarks were among several friendly responses to Professor Miroslav Volf’s presentation, “Do Christians & Muslims Worship the Same God?” delivered at the Islamic Foundation of Villa Park, IL on Feb. 27, 2016.

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]]> The Other Internet https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/03/the-other-internet https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/03/the-other-internet Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500 The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by matthew b. crawford
 farrar, straus and giroux, 320 pages, $26

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]]> The Cardinal Virtues & The Walking Dead https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/01/the-cardinal-virtues-the-walking-dead https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/01/the-cardinal-virtues-the-walking-dead Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500 An academic friend was visiting from abroad, and after a day of talks and teaching, we wound down around ten o’clock at night. Noticing my exhaustion, he offered a secret to decompression. “Zohmbies, Mahtt,” he counseled in his inimitable Greek accent. So it was that I tuned into my first episode of The Walking Dead , where Glenn—having saved multiple lives—was asked by a fellow survivor what he did before the end of the world. “Delivered pizzas,” he shrugged. For all the downsides of the apocalypse, it can also summon hitherto dormant reserves of virtue. I quickly learned that the talent of the show’s make-up artists often eclipses that of its writers—but not always.

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]]> The Last Scapegoat https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/12/the-last-scapegoat https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/12/the-last-scapegoat Thu, 24 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500 The following is a sermon given last Sunday at All Souls Church (Wheaton, IL) in the wake of another Wheaton media controversy.

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]]> An American Virgil https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/09/an-american-virgil https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/09/an-american-virgil Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400 A mong the more adventurous sallies in church décor in recent memory is the dancing saints sequence at San Francisco’s Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, where Hypatia, Charles Darwin and William Blake among others have been drafted into the communio sanctorum. Perhaps the program is less a declaration than a prayer, illustrating Hans Urs von Balthasar’s dictum that universalism is a hope though not a doctrine. But if so, wouldn’t a message of God’s universal love necessitate the inclusion of a figure or two who would rankle San Francisco Episcopalians? Still, there are many in the sequence who should long ago have been visualized in the context of Christian worship, and one especially justified inclusion is the Native American visionary Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950). 

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