Guided by Kristen Scharold, The Pub was founded in 2006 and became the first independent academic journal on the campus of Wheaton College IL. It’s original conception was intentionally vague, according to Scharold, but aimed to challenge the social and cultural status quo through the exchange...

Remember being at the creek, kingfisher one? You dropped your phone in the water and got your

LUCID FEVER

We were working through the Babylonian exile period of Hebrew history in one of our remote course sessions this week. Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles was referenced in terms of how the captives were to carry on with life in exile, while separated from the land of the promise and all that meant for...

God’s silence on the cross, as a silence that brings suffering to God himself, can be interpreted, very paradoxically, as solidarity with Jesus and the crucified of history —Sobrino, 246

My grandmother used to serve my siblings and me Hostess Twinkies, always halved. It's not because she didn't have a whole Twinkie to give. As I later realized, her halved Twinkies were a remnant of her experience of the Great Depression. I will never know what that experience was like, but I was...

In October of last year my mother-in-law, Rachel, died of ALS. Death by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is horrifying. A person’s muscles decay to nothing, leaving her mentally alert and thus acutely aware of her steady march to respiratory failure. Of course, calling it a march is mordantly ironic....

THE FUTILITY OF "NORMAL"

COVID-19 exposes lies that Americans have built their national identity upon. To start with, there’s the lie of perpetual prosperity. In a recent episode of Planet Money, a woman unemployed because of the pandemic said with a doubtful laugh, “There's got to be a happy ending. It's America.”

Recently, I have seen a plethora of people, especially brown and black people, sharing tweets that rebuke the racist and classist explanation white people have given to explain the disproportionate deaths that black people have been experiencing from COVID-19. 70% of the deaths in Chicago, one of...

James Baldwin, the twentieth century novelist and writer, is as insightful as ever. If we want to understand our times, the racism and white supremacy we inhabit, I believe we should read Baldwin, especially his Notes of a Native Son. In Notes, Baldwin claims we live with “self-righteous, virtuous...

Over the past few years, we’ve been in survival mode. I remember learning in a high school psychology course that when our bodies face life-threatening circumstances, unnecessary processes, like digestion, come to a halt. Digestion doesn’t seem so unnecessary to me, but this is an apt analogy for...