Review of Lower than the Angels by Diarmaid MacCulloch, New York Times Book Review, April 2025

Christians today might disagree on any number of questions around gender and sexuality: Can women be members of the clergy? Can same-sex couples marry? Is reproductive choice a right? Is contraception a sin? Does gender transition affirm divine truth or does it transgress a God-given binary? But as Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in “Lower Than the Angels,” his magisterial new history of the many different Christian attitudes toward sex, these preoccupations define only the past half-century of the faith. For the previous 1,900 years or so, the most important question was this: Is it sinful to get married and have kids?

“Pandemics have long created labor crises. Here’s why.” Made by History, Washington Post, June 2021

In England, the post-plague labor crisis led to the introduction of the first national labor laws, a response to worker demands for higher wages and better conditions after enduring dangerous work during the pandemic. In response, the elite found new ways to repress workers and maintain a class hierarchy, reminding us of the stakes of the conversation about labor today.

“Illness & Crisis, from Medieval Plague Tracts to Covid-19,” New York Review of Books Daily, March 2020

Medieval plague tracts aimed to serve what Jacme d’Agramont called “the common and public good.” But the advice they offered emphasized a personal regimen that could scarcely slow the spread of the plague or diminish its effects. Their prescriptions reveal the limits of individual action in combating such a shared predicament as a pandemic.