Articles & Essays
An archive of essays, opinion pieces, reviews, and popular scholarship — written to bring the questions of the soul, the mind, and the human person out of the seminar room. Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters are catalogued separately under Research.
Essentia Foundation
June 2023Panpsychism promises to solve the hard problem by spreading experience through the cosmos. Farris presses the combination problem: micro-experiences never add up to a unified phenomenal subject, and it is subjects, not experiences, that need explaining.
The Christian Post
February 2023Dementia is often treated as evidence that the self is nothing more than a functioning brain. Farris argues the opposite: the losses we grieve presuppose an enduring subject who is being lost to us. A pastoral and philosophical case for the soul at the bedside.
The Christian Post
January 2023Transhumanist projects promise enhancement but quietly assume a thin anthropology in which persons are just information to be optimized. Farris asks what such a picture costs us morally and theologically.
Circe Institute
November 2021A defense of humane learning in an age of measurable outcomes. Farris argues that the humanities are not a luxury good but the training ground for souls capable of judgment.
The North American Anglican
July 2020A clear, non-technical introduction to the question that organizes much of Farris's work: whether I am identical to my body, my soul, or some union of the two — and why the answer matters for worship and death.
Didaktikos
June 2018As machines take on more of what we once called distinctively human work, Farris asks teachers of theology to articulate afresh why human beings still matter.
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Mind Matters News
November 2023A response to Philip Goff's godless panpsychism: if consciousness goes all the way down to atoms and particles, what unifies it? Farris argues that parsimony favors theism, which supplies the explanatory resources panpsychism lacks.
Reviews in Religion and Theology
August 2023A multiple review article on recent work by Matthews, Welker, and Song about digital life, marriage and family, and the formation of attention by our devices.
Essentia Foundation
June 2023Panpsychism promises to solve the hard problem by spreading experience through the cosmos. Farris presses the combination problem: micro-experiences never add up to a unified phenomenal subject, and it is subjects, not experiences, that need explaining.
Essentia Foundation
April 2023Naturalism is often treated as the default frame for serious inquiry. Farris argues that theism is not an intrusion into that frame but a better fit for minds, meaning, and the intelligibility of nature itself.
The Christian Post
March 2023Adoption is a theological reality before it is a psychological one, but psychology has much to teach adoptive families about attachment and grief. A practical reflection for parents and pastors.
The American Mind (Salvo)
March 2023A brief for the intellectual respectability of the soul, written for readers who assume the question was settled by neuroscience. Farris shows why first-person knowledge keeps returning the soul to the table.
Word by Word (Logos)
February 2023A survey of the leading models of race — biological, social, and constructivist — read theologically. Farris asks which model, if any, can carry the moral weight Christians place on human commonality.
The Christian Post
February 2023Dementia is often treated as evidence that the self is nothing more than a functioning brain. Farris argues the opposite: the losses we grieve presuppose an enduring subject who is being lost to us. A pastoral and philosophical case for the soul at the bedside.
Word by Word (Logos)
January 2023Holistic monism has become the assumed reading of Scripture on human nature. Farris makes the case that a body–soul dichotomy explains the biblical data — including the intermediate state — with less strain, not more.
The Christian Post
January 2023Transhumanist projects promise enhancement but quietly assume a thin anthropology in which persons are just information to be optimized. Farris asks what such a picture costs us morally and theologically.
Reviews in Religion and Theology
October 2022A review of Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt's Christian reflections on the everyday, and of the quiet argument that ordinary life is where theology is tested.
The North American Anglican
July 2022An essay on how theological language bends under contemporary pressure, and what Anglicans stand to lose when inherited terms are quietly re-tooled.
Christian Research Institute
July 2022A review article on Ozark and the slow moral corrosion of a family that keeps telling itself it is protecting its own. Accompanied by a Postmodern Realities podcast episode.
Christian Research Institute
June 2022The series Severance imagines a surgical split between work-self and home-self. Farris reads it as a parable about fragmented personhood and the modern refusal to let a life be one life. Published with a companion Postmodern Realities podcast episode.
Didaktikos
December 2021A short state-of-the-field essay on analytic theology's second decade: what it has delivered, where the criticisms have landed, and how to teach it well.
Didaktikos
November 2021A briefing for theological educators on where atonement debates now stand, from penal substitution to Anselmian satisfaction and reparative models. Part of the Currents in Theology series.
Circe Institute
November 2021A defense of humane learning in an age of measurable outcomes. Farris argues that the humanities are not a luxury good but the training ground for souls capable of judgment.
The North American Anglican
September 2021A review of a recent attempt to define orthodox Anglican identity, weighing whether it succeeds in naming what holds the tradition together beyond institutional habit.
The North American Anglican
August 2021Both sides of the vaccine argument leaned on assumptions about bodies, conscience, and the common good that were rarely examined. Farris supplies the missing theological premises.
The North American Anglican
August 2021Authority in the church is a gift that becomes dangerous without accountable structures. Farris examines how evangelical and Anglican habits alike can shelter authoritarian leadership.
Psychology for Living
June 2021Disappearing on someone is easy and increasingly normal. Farris treats ghosting as a small refusal of personhood and asks what a Christian account of presence requires instead.
The Imaginative Conservative
January 2021An appeal for evangelicals to recover both clarity of conviction and charity of manner after a bruising political season.
Mere Orthodoxy
September 2020Faces are not incidental to persons; they are how we are given to one another. Farris weighs the genuine costs of covering them, without pretending the practical question is simple.
The Imaginative Conservative
August 2020Written from inside the university, this essay makes the case that classical schools are doing work the academy has largely abandoned — and that scholars should take them seriously.
Furthering Christendom
August 2020A guest essay on institutional scandal in evangelical higher education and the structural incentives that make it predictable rather than surprising.
Patheos (Euangelion)
August 2020A short argument that recent anthropology has reorganized itself around Christology and relationality at the cost of questions about human constitution that will not stay suppressed.
The North American Anglican
July 2020A clear, non-technical introduction to the question that organizes much of Farris's work: whether I am identical to my body, my soul, or some union of the two — and why the answer matters for worship and death.
Modern Reformation
June 2020Human beings are made for the vision of God. Farris draws on Reformed sources to recover a teleological anthropology in which our final end shapes what we are now.
Reformation 21
June 2020A programmatic sketch of what a full-orbed theological anthropology should include — constitution, image, sin, and destiny — and why piecemeal treatments keep failing.
Patheos (Euangelion)
January 2020Co-authored with S. Mark Hamilton, a two-part essay on how the category of the sacred became embarrassing to modern Christians, and what is lost when it goes.
Saved Magazine
January 2020Before the argument can be had, the term needs defining. Farris distinguishes several things people mean by Christian nationalism and evaluates each on its own terms.
Evangelical Philosophical Society (Web Project)
June 2019A reply to William Hasker on the origin of the soul, defending emergent-creationism as the account that best preserves both the unity of the person and divine agency in creating selves.
Blogos (Logos Institute, University of St Andrews)
May 2019A focused reply in an ongoing exchange about whether penal substitution, as usually stated, actually delivers substitution at all.
The City (Houston Baptist University)
March 2019The claim that science has disproved the soul is a philosophical claim wearing a lab coat. Farris separates the empirical findings from the metaphysics attached to them.
Blogos (Logos Institute, University of St Andrews)
January 2019What exactly is analytic theology analyzing? Farris argues the movement is best understood as a search for conceptual architecture rather than a set of doctrinal commitments.
Blogos (Logos Institute, University of St Andrews)
October 2018A defense of Anselmian satisfaction against the standard Protestant complaints, arguing that it accounts for divine justice better than its penal rival.
Intersections (Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity)
September 2018Co-authored with S. Mark Hamilton. An argument about the moral status of frozen embryos and what obligations follow for Christians who believe persons begin early.
Didaktikos
June 2018As machines take on more of what we once called distinctively human work, Farris asks teachers of theology to articulate afresh why human beings still matter.
Philosophy Now
June 2018Farris defends the simple view of personal identity: what makes me the same person over time is not psychological continuity or bodily continuity but the persistence of a simple self. Second printing of the 2015 essay.
SCM Press Blog
May 2018Assurance of salvation is a dogmatic question before it is a psychological one. Farris listens to the several voices in the tradition without flattening them into one.
The Pillars Magazine
January 2018A reflection on Pantologia, the interdisciplinary colloquium Farris helped run, and on why a university needs places where the disciplines actually meet.
Patheos (Evangelical Pulpit)
December 2017A critique of the popular claim that the Father turned on the Son at Calvary, and of the trinitarian damage that claim does when preached.
Reviews in Religion and Theology
June 2017A review of Peter Mahon's guide to posthumanism, read with an eye to what Christian anthropology should concede and what it must refuse.
Mind and Matter
April 2016Co-authored with Scott Prather. A review article on Benedikt Paul Göcke's After Physicalism, asking whether the debate has anywhere left to go.
Mind and Matter
October 2015A review article on Lavazza and Robinson's Contemporary Dualism: A Defense, surveying the renewed philosophical respectability of dualist accounts of mind.
Reviews in Religion and Theology
September 2015A review of Meilaender's Should We Live Forever? The Ethical Ambiguities of Aging, weighing his case that finitude is a gift rather than a defect to be engineered away.
The Table (Biola Center for Christian Thought)
August 2015Written alongside The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, this essay revisits the biblical material often cited against the soul and finds it far less decisive than advertised.
Philosophy Now
April 2015The original Philosophy Now essay introducing a general readership to the simple view of personal identity and the puzzles that motivate it.
This archive is drawn from Joshua's curriculum vitae and Soul Science Ministries. Where an original link was not published or is no longer available, the card is marked accordingly; links are added as they are confirmed.