I agree with the idea of abstracting pieces out so that they can be reusable outside of express but I don't really think you'd be getting anything out of this if I did that. Basically you get to pass an arbitrary function that gets called on all the object values, which seems pointless and doesn't really have anything to do with "rendering partials". This takes all the benefits of express (template rendering, content headers, etc.) and adds one more minor piece on top of that.