Start Here

This is the ending-war chapel. You don't have to be a veteran to enter, but you have to be willing to see what veterans see — that the machine keeps running long after the war ends, and that the Gospel has something to say about that which it mostly hasn't said yet.

Martinalia is where I write that.

My name is Logan Martin Isaac. I spent six years as an enlisted artillery forward observer, deployed to Iraq with the 25th Infantry Division, and came home to discover that the Christian tradition I'd grown up inside had almost nothing useful to say to me — not because it lacked resources, but because nobody had read those resources from where I was standing. I went to Duke and St Andrews to find out if that was true. It was. So I started doing the reading myself.

That reading has a name: the martial hermeneutic. The short version is that combat experience is a legitimate place to stand when you open the Bible — not a disqualifier, not a wound to be healed before you're allowed to interpret, but an epistemological location with its own sight lines. From that location, things are visible that aren't visible from the chaplain's office or the war college or the front pew.

I write about what I see from here.

Some of it is exegetical — word studies, scripture commentary, the biblical material that military culture has been handed in mutilated form and deserves to receive whole. Some of it is testimonial — civil rights cases, accountability journalism, the record of what institutions do when they'd rather not be seen. Some of it is monastic — I'm a life-professed member of the Hospitallers of Saint Martin, and the rhythms of that life show up in the writing whether I plan them to or not.

It's one life. I've stopped pretending otherwise.

If you're a veteran or active-duty believer, you'll recognize most of what you find here before I finish explaining it. That's the point. If you're a civilian — a minister, a scholar, a family member, someone who keeps ending up in proximity to military communities without a map — you're also in the right place. Not to learn about veterans. To learn to see alongside them, which is a different thing.

Subscribe if you want the essays before they go anywhere else. That's the exchange: your email address for first access to the writing, before it graduates to its permanent home.

You don't have to agree with me. You just have to be willing to look.